


down like new york city (wild like los angeles)

by DivineProjectZero



Category: Leverage
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:35:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25688932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DivineProjectZero/pseuds/DivineProjectZero
Summary: Eliot’s been to a lot of places around the world.(And he keeps running into this attractive, curly-haired bastard along the way.)
Relationships: Mr. Quinn/Eliot Spencer (Leverage)
Comments: 69
Kudos: 144





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Self-betaed. All mistakes are mine. Constructive feedback is always welcome.
> 
> Updates are slated to be on Mondays and Fridays. 
> 
> Title from "International Love" by Pitbull.

Eliot’s been to a lot of places around the world. It’s inevitable when you get his kind of career and reputation. Some places he’d rather never see again, but some places are beautiful enough to steal his breath away and make all the hard work worth it. Like right now. 

Buenos Aires is stunning, with wild colors painted across some neighborhoods while others bear the stern facade of fading European grandeur, modern skyscrapers emerging in a cluster much like every other financial district in a major city. The bright colors of La Boca are even more striking under the red glare of the sunset, and Eliot basks in it, just a little. There’s still the rich aftertaste of locro lingering in his mouth, just begging to be chased away with a strong swig of beer, and he’s had a handful of women—and a couple of men—give him lingering looks, silent invitations to come closer. It’s like all the ingredients for a perfect night are in his grasp, and it’s putting him in a good mood. 

But before he can let himself have any fun, he has a job to do.

The job is easy: go find the courier, intercept the package, then drop the package off at the predesignated location. He doesn’t expect any trouble.

Everything goes smoothly. He knocks out the courier and takes the package, a small parcel wrapped in yellow paper, then walks half a mile towards the drop-off point with it tucked under his arm. He keeps an ear and eye out the whole way, but nothing happens.

When he arrives at an abandoned office building beside the Matanza River, there’s a man dressed in a sharp-cut suit and a striped tie waiting for him. 

“Did you bring the package?” The man asks. There’s a faint hint of a Spanish accent curling through his words, and his tone is relaxed. But the eyes behind the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses are sharp as they size Eliot up. 

Eliot holds the parcel up in response, and hands it to the man, who unties the twine and unwraps the package to reveal what looks like a dusty book. Eliot has no idea how valuable this thing exactly is, but the satisfied way the man smiles indicates that it’s well worth the fifty grand that Eliot’s going to be paid.

“My boss will be pleased,” the man says. He takes out his phone and makes a call, speaking in rapid-fire Spanish once the call connects. The conversation lasts less than a minute; in no time at all, the man is shoving his phone back into his pocket with a curt nod at Eliot. “Expect the payment from us within the hour.”

“Good to do business with you,” Eliot says, already thinking about what to do with the rest of his night. It’s a shame, he thinks, because if this man weren’t working for his client, he’d definitely consider making an overture. He looks a few years younger than Eliot and is well-built, with a boyishly handsome face and curls that Eliot would love to run his fingers through. Eliot’s always appreciated a man—or woman—in a well-fitted suit.

“Pleasure,” the man replies, then turns and walks away. Eliot takes a moment to appreciate the sight, then makes his way out of the building through the other direction.

It’s only thirty minutes later, when he gets a phone call from his client saying that the book in his hands is a forgery, that Eliot realizes something is wrong. 

He argues that he brought the package just as he was told to do, and that if the book was a forgery, it must have been replaced before he laid hands on it. And that his lackey in the suit had seemed to think the book was genuine, anyway.

“I didn’t send anybody in my stead,” the client says. “You and I talked directly when you handed me the book.”

Oh, _oh_. Eliot feels a groan building up in his chest. “Did I happen to have incredibly curly hair?”

When the client says yes, Eliot grinds his teeth together. He can’t believe he fell for such a basic trick. This is the problem when he and the client don’t know each other’s faces beforehand. Whoever that curly-haired bastard is, Eliot’s going to find him one day, and beat the hell out of him.

Suffice it to say, Eliot doesn’t get paid.

-

He runs into the curly-haired asshole again in the bustling aisles of the Nehru Bazaar in Jaipur. The air is thick with the scent of perfumes and leather, saturated with loud words of Hindi intermingling with Dhundari, and Eliot picks out the blond curls and boyish face as easily as breathing, even though it’s been four months since their single encounter.

He makes a beeline for the guy, trying not to be too conspicuous about it, just so he can surprise the fucker with a punch to the face, but the other guy looks up and sees Eliot. His eyes go wide, his whole body twitching upright from its casual slouch, and then he’s dashing off without looking back. 

Eliot curses, immediately following after. He’s here to pick up a package that’s worth six figures, and he can immediately tell that this bastard is here for the same purpose. Like _hell_ he’s going to let the guy walk away scot-free with the goods this time. 

It’s a trial to run under the unforgiving sun in the ruthless Indian heat, but Eliot’s been through worse, so he grits his teeth and runs. His competition is fast, though; Eliot can barely keep up. The only reason Eliot doesn’t lose the guy completely is because of all the people hindering the guy’s progress, and soon enough the geography starts helping as well, because they’re running towards the Ramganj Bazaar, which is a labyrinth of crooked paths and cut-off streets, which works entirely in Eliot’s favor when the both of them end up running into one such dead end. 

“Ready to get your ass kicked?” Eliot asks, and the other guy bares his teeth in a challenging smile.

Eliot charges first, and he’s only half-surprised when the guy evades his punch and instead fluidly counters with a sharp blow to Eliot’s side. He hadn’t been completely sure, but the shift of the guy’s muscles under his linen shirt and his agility had given him the hint that this guy might be a proper hitter. He’s proven right when the guy goes for Eliot’s jaw next, but Eliot ducks the blow and slams a fist straight into the guy’s stomach.

To his credit, the curly haired bastard doesn’t go down for another good five minutes. He’s fast, but his stamina and ability to take a beating isn’t as good as Eliot’s, so he starts flagging fast once Eliot manages to land a solid punch to his solar plexus. 

By the time he’s managed to knock the guy down completely, Eliot’s feeling just a tiny bit smug. Sure, one of his ribs might be cracked, but this guy is going to need a hospital for _weeks_. 

At the very least, it means there’s less competition for the job.

“See you around,” he tells the other guy, who wordlessly raises a middle finger at him, which makes him chuckle. Then he walks away, leaving the guy groaning on the ground of the dusty alleyway.

The rest of the day goes smoothly, no sly hitters conning him or the client, the package retrieved and delivered in the span of three hours. He double-checks to make sure that the payment came through, and then he celebrates by gorging himself on spicy laal maas and sweet gajak, then takes a cab thirty minutes out from the city center and checks into the Fairmont Jaipur. It’s a sprawling building with an austere air of 19th century traditional Rajasthani architecture, but the interior is elegant and not overly gaudy. It’s a nice place to unwind for a while after a job well-done. 

He takes advantage of the slowly darkening evening to go out to the swimming pool behind the hotel building, the few bruises darkening on his skin from his encounter with the curly haired bastard less noticeable in the dim light. He relaxes in the cool water for a while, taking his time to go a couple laps around the pool. Then he meets the eyes of a young woman with long legs and dark hair plaited down all the way to her hips. When she smiles at him, he smiles back.

For some reason though, his mind lingers on curly hair, short and dirty blond, falling into soft brown eyes. The image doesn’t leave his mind, even when he eventually leaves the city behind.

-

Sydney is a beautiful city. It’s a shame that Eliot isn’t getting to appreciate any of it, because he’s too busy being chased down by a motorcycle gang. Eliot is going to maim his client for neglecting to tell him that the job would involve the Bandidos, because he isn’t exactly equipped to go up against two dozen biker gang members who have motorbikes and guns, whereas he has neither.

He’s trying to sneak his way out of the harbor so that he can make his way back to the crowded streets where he can blend in, but it’s a long way to go. He’s resigning himself to a long night of cat and mouse when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye.

He turns and sees the curly haired bastard from Jaipur glaring at him, like he’s personally affronted by Eliot’s presence. It takes Eliot a moment to realize that his abrupt arrival setting off the alarm with the Bandidos must’ve gotten in the way of this guy trying to do a stealthy job of, well, whatever the fuck he was in the middle of doing.

Well, fuck him. Serves him right.

It takes four minutes for the two of them to end up hiding behind the same corner of a warehouse. 

“Thanks for sounding the alarm, asshole,” the other guy mutters. Eliot distantly notes that his accent is very American, slightly on the southern side.

“Yeah, well, it’s not like I knew they were gonna be here,” Eliot grumbles. “So, we can’t outrun ‘em.”

The guy raises an eyebrow. “We?”

Eliot shrugs. “We’re on the same boat right now.”

The other guy thinks about that for a few seconds, then huffs. “Fine.” He pulls out a Beretta from a concealed shoulder holster under his suit jacket, then glances at Eliot. “You got a weapon?”

Eliot hefts a crowbar he picked up a while ago onto his shoulder as an answer.

The other guy sighs, looking like he’s regretting this temporary alliance already. “If I give you a gun, will you promise not to shoot me with it?”

“I don’t like guns,” Eliot says.

“Why, are you a terrible shot?” There’s no genuine mockery in the guy’s tone, though. He seems to accept Eliot’s reluctance to use a firearm easily enough, instead focusing on peering around the corner to check on their pursuers. “Oh, that’s just sad. They’re going in circles like stray dogs.”

“You good enough to shoot out their tires?” Eliot asks, and the guy turns to give him a delighted grin. 

Twenty minutes later, every bike in the vicinity has been rendered useless and Eliot’s managed to knock out fourteen of the bikers. His temporary ally is using a Glock—apparently he had an extra gun clipped to the back of his belt _and_ another gun strapped to his ankle—to terrorize one of the bikers into giving him the intel that he originally came here for. 

Once the guy is satisfied, he cracks the biker across the face with his gun to knock him out, and then he clips it to the back of his belt again. 

“Well, that was fun,” he says to Eliot, and it’s surprising to see how charming he looks with that easygoing smile of his. “I guess I forgive you for breaking my ribs and my collarbone.” He pauses. “Still kinda mad about my wrist, though. That fucked my aim up for weeks, man.”

Eliot rolls his eyes. “Stop whining. That was five months ago.”

“I’m sorry, I should follow your example and just beat the shit out of the guy who screwed up my job last time,” the guy snarks. Eliot kind of likes him, even if he’s still annoying as hell.

“Wouldn’t work for you, since I’d win,” Eliot says, unable to quite hide a grin as he says that.

The other guy definitely sees it, because he huffs in amusement, seemingly not offended. “We’ll see about that.”

They exchange barbs dulled with good humor for a couple more minutes before splitting up in silent agreement. Eliot goes down south, towards the airport, while the other guy heads up north based on the intel he got from the biker. 

It’s only when he’s on a plane heading out to Johannesburg that it occurs to Eliot that he still doesn’t know the other guy’s name.

-

He’s sitting at a table in Hospůdka Na Hradbách and drinking cheap beer, enjoying the view of the riverside and the soothing chatter of families and other patrons of the beer garden, when somebody slides into the seat across from him. Eliot freezes at the sight of curly hair and a dark gray suit, but then he sees the glass of beer in the other hitter’s hand. 

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” the other guy says with a mischievous smile curling across his mouth.

“Casablanca? Really?” Eliot raises an unimpressed eyebrow.

The other guy shrugs. “Seemed like a better line than asking what’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this.”

Eliot can’t help but crack a shit-eating grin at that. “You think I’m nice?”

“Absolutely not.” The other guy grins back. He takes a sip of his beer. “So, is there something fun going on around here that I’m missing out on?”

“Not that I know of,” Eliot says, honest. “I’m here on vacation.”

The other guy hums. “Yeah, Prague is nice for that. Even if all the locals are hellbent on ripping tourists off.” His eyelashes are almost golden in the later afternoon sunlight, just like the stray curls falling into his eyes. “I’m on my way to Dresden for work. You’re not going there, are you?”

“Got nothing lined up for now.” It feels odd to be discussing work schedules with another hitter. Especially a hitter that he’s only met a handful of times. The last time they’d seen each other had been a little over three months ago. Which reminds him: “Huh, it’s been a year since Buenos Aires.”

The other guy blinks, then quirks a sly smile. “It’s a couple weeks late for our anniversary, darlin’.”

It’s awfully telling, Eliot thinks, that his instinctive response to the joke and the pet name isn’t to tell the guy to fuck off, but to say, “Don’t expect any presents from me.”

“Does that mean the honeymoon period’s over?” The other guy teases, and there’s something sly in his tone that has Eliot pausing just as he raises his beer glass to his lips. 

He reconsiders the gleaming brown eyes, the upwards curve of his smile, the relaxed slope of broad shoulders. He hasn’t thought about this in a while, but now that he has the other man sitting across from him, looking delectable in a sharply tailored suit and flirting with Eliot like there aren’t several broken bones and jobs gone awry between them, he feels a wordless kind of hunger stir in the pit of his stomach.

“You’re gonna need to take me somewhere better if you want a proper honeymoon.” Eliot raises an eyebrow in a silent challenge as he takes a slow sip of his beer.

“What, Sydney wasn’t good enough for you?” The other hitter drums his fingertips against the wooden table and Eliot absentmindedly wonders how callused they are, what they’d feel like inside of him. “We’re in one of the most beautiful cities in the world right now, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“So this is your ideal honeymoon?” Eliot asks, glancing around them. It’s a nice place with a spectacular view, but it’s not exactly romantic or alluring. It’s a cheap joint, after all.

The other hitter licks his lips, and Eliot can’t help but track the movement. “Ideally, I’d take you to the Mandarin Oriental. The one here is one of the best in the world, you know. Great view. And their suites are nice if vaulted ceilings are your thing.” He takes a brief swig from his glass and continues, “Take you out for dinner in the restaurant there, go on a walk by the river, maybe beat a few thugs up, take you back to the room and make good use of that bed.”

“The Mandarin Oriental?” Eliot asks, amused. He usually sticks to decent motels or mediocre hotels, but occasionally he splurges on the good stuff, because what’s the point of getting paid well if you’re not going to spend well? But going to one of the most historic hotels in the world just to get laid isn’t something he’s ever done. “You’re fucking spoiled.”

“Only the best for you,” the other man deadpans, and Eliot laughs.

He’s tempted to take him up on the offer. Going to a needlessly luxurious hotel and ruining the bedsheets sounds amazing. Honestly, he doesn’t even need the luxury; he’d be okay with a dingy one star hotel, if it meant spending a sleepless night with this man.

But he opts for caution instead. “Maybe you can make that happen when you have time off, instead of when you have a job to get to.”

The other guy shrugs. “Fair enough. I do have a midnight train to catch.”

They chat for a few more minutes, just enough for Eliot to get a general idea of what this guy’s been up to in the past couple months. It’s nice and unexpectedly friendly, definitely helped by the fact the beer is warming his belly and the hint of a southern drawl in the other man’s voice feels a little like home. Then the guy’s standing up, his beer drained, and bidding Eliot goodbye.

“Hey, you might as well tell me your name,” Eliot says.

The other hitter smiles. “I’ll tell you next time we run into each other.” He claps a hand to Eliot’s shoulder and leans in close, his breath warm against Eliot’s ear as he murmurs, “See you around, Eliot Spencer.”

-

Eliot doesn’t find out the other guy’s name in their next encounter, because he’s escorting a client through the outskirts of Chiang Mai when his client gets shot through the head. Eliot curses loudly as civilians start shrieking and running. His client is dead, so he leaves the body behind for now and ducks behind cover to scan the nearby buildings to identify the best perch, and then clocks the sniper’s location. From there, he runs towards the office building where the sniper must still be located, trusting the dark of the night and the flickering lights to be enough to stop the sniper from realizing he’s heading there.

It’s only when he’s busted through the door leading to the roof of the building that he realizes that the sniper might be expecting him, instead of trying to make a clean getaway.

“You just had to come up here, didn’t you,” a voice he hasn’t heard in seven months says, and Eliot takes one look at an immaculate suit and wild curls and a Beretta aimed his way, and thinks _fuck_.

A bullet tears through his thigh, and Eliot goes down to his knees with a hiss. It’s a clean shot; the bullet didn’t hit his arteries or his femur, but it still hurts like a bitch. Eliot knows, from past experiences rooted in Sydney, that this shot was entirely intentional. It’s meant to keep Eliot down and slow, just enough to keep him from following while the other hitter escapes. There’s no intention to cause permanent or significant harm to Eliot.

“You should get a doctor to take a look at that,” the other hitter says amicably, hitching the strap of the rifle case onto one shoulder. He gives Eliot a wide berth as he makes his exit, and Eliot decides it’s not worth the energy to try to go after him. “And try sticking to nicer areas from now on. I want a better honeymoon than this.”

“You’re the one who’s supposed to take me somewhere, not the other way around,” Eliot yells on autopilot as he rips a strip of his undershirt off to tie it around his gunshot wound. 

He hears laughter ringing up the stairwell, and then the guy’s gone. 

-

A week later, Eliot is sitting at a terrace overlooking the Ébrié Lagoon in the center of Abidjan, polishing off the last of his kedjenou when he decides now is a good time. He signals at the waitress and asks for a cup of coffee, then rolls his shoulders as he revels in the pleasant heat and clear sky. He loves the Ivory Coast. Great food, beautiful scenery, and plenty of attractive people. Not to mention that Eliot’s always had a soft spot for people speaking French.

Which is why a pleasant shiver rolls through him when he makes the phone call and the other side picks up with a perfectly accented, “Oui, allo?” 

“Salut, connard,” Eliot says. “You owe me your name and a hell of a honeymoon.”

“Spencer?” The surprise in the voice quickly morphs into warm amusement. “Dare I ask how you got this number?”

“You can ask all you want, but I ain’t tellin’.”

“Fair enough.” The other hitter hums. “How’s the bullet wound?”

“Still need another week before I can take the stitches out.” The waitress comes back with his coffee and he thanks her with a warm smile. “Merci.”

There’s a pause over the phone. “Spencer, where exactly are you?”

Eliot grins. “Where do you think?”

“Huh.” He can hear the faint mechanical sound of a gun being loaded. “Here to return the favor?”

“I’m here to teach you a lesson,” Eliot corrects.

A nearly inaudible huff of laughter comes through. “And what kind of lesson might that be?”

The flirtatious tone is almost enough to make Eliot revise his plans and go teach this bastard a lesson with his hands and mouth. Almost. “That you shouldn’t piss me off, _Quinn_.”

He hears a sharp inhale, and then even better, he hears the sound of knocking and a loud voice demanding that Quinn open the door. The aggravated note in Quinn’s voice is just the sweet cherry on top. “Spencer, what the fuck did you do?”

“Interpol can work fast when you give them a big enough fish,” Eliot explains, and enjoys the rapid-fire cursing Quinn directs at him. Quinn is apparently very creative with swearing in four different languages.

“Have fun, darlin’,” Eliot says sweetly, then hangs up. 

His coffee tastes amazing. Doubly so when he hears the sound of police sirens from one block away. 


	2. Chapter 2

The Park Hyatt New York is a dream of a hotel. It’s not the kind of luxury Eliot would usually go for, but his client was gracious enough to book him a whole four nights here, so he isn’t complaining. It’s spacious, which is something rare in Manhattan, and the interior is minimalist enough to make him feel more at ease. The location of the place and the building the hotel is situated in are both impeccable, and Eliot’s heard incredible things about the spa and the swimming pool here.

Unfortunately, the security needs some work.

“Do you know how hard it is to break out of an unofficial Interpol prison?” Quinn asks, sounding disgruntled from where he’s perched on one of the couches in the sitting area of Eliot’s hotel room. He’s wearing another one of his suits, this time a neatly pressed navy blue pinstripe one and a deep red tie with a perfect Windsor knot, and his curls have grown out a little, just enough to make Eliot’s fingers itch with the desire to pull on them.

“Three weeks for a jailbreak?” Eliot taunts, closing his hotel door behind him and peeling his jacket off. “Would’ve taken me ten days, tops.”

“Took me a week, actually,” Quinn says. “Ended up having to do a job inside the place before I got out—it’s actually a funny story—but my point is that you cost me a safehouse and my favorite suit.”

Eliot doesn’t really understand the point in having a favorite article of clothing when the chance of it getting ruined with blood is way too high in their line of work, but it’s hard to judge a guy for his obsession with fashion when he looks criminally attractive in a suit. “Right, because you don’t have any others.”

Quinn seems unimpressed by the sarcasm. “You know, I wouldn’t have expected you to let law enforcement do the legwork. You seem more like the type to, let’s see, try to break my ribs.”

“Still had a bullet wound in my leg, so.” Eliot opens the mini-bar and scowls when he discovers that Quinn’s already raided half the thing. He takes one of the remaining soda cans and ambles over to drop into the seat across from his uninvited guest. He’s pretty sure Quinn isn’t here to shoot him—he could’ve done that twice over already, if he’d wanted—but he’s not going to relax enough to go for a beer when a skilled hitter just broke into his hotel room while he was out finishing a job. “So, you here to just whine at me, or do you have something actually important to do around here?”

“What, I can’t be here for both?” Quinn crosses his legs and taps his fingers against one knee. Eliot takes a moment to admire the way Quinn’s shoulders look in his jacket, and then he looks further down to take in the fit of his suit. The tailoring is just loose enough to afford Quinn more range of movement, while still allowing him to look upsettingly good.

Eliot wonders what Quinn would look like if he took the suit off.

When he looks back up, Quinn is watching him with one corner of his mouth tilted upwards, like he’s very aware of the fact that Eliot’s been looking. Imagining. 

“Maybe,” Quinn says slowly, in a low voice that has Eliot’s attention zeroing in on him, “I’m here for something else.”

The way Quinn licks his lips after the statement—nothing ostentatious; more like it’s a subconscious act, which makes it all the more enticing—is an unmistakable invitation, and Eliot feels his mouth go dry.

Eliot very slowly lets his knees widen from his sprawl on the armchair, and is immediately rewarded with the way Quinn’s breath near-silently catches in his chest, his eyes darkening in blatant interest. “You got anything specific in mind?” 

“A lot of things, actually.” Quinn pushes himself up from his seat into a standing position, slowly moving his way into Eliot’s space, giving Eliot plenty of time and opportunity to move away or push him back. 

Eliot does neither of those things.

Quinn plucks the soda can from Eliot’s grip and sets it aside on the coffee table, then carefully settles one knee between Eliot’s spread thighs so that he’s leaning over Eliot, boxing him in with both hands gripping the back of the armchair. He hovers close enough for his nose to nearly brush against Eliot’s. 

“You should’ve just come over to my safehouse,” Quinn murmurs. He presses one palm flat against the center of Eliot’s chest, the warmth seeping in through the thin layer of Eliot’s shirt. “Should’ve let me make it up to you for Chiang Mai.”

“How would you’ve made it up to me?” Eliot asks, tilting his head up, chasing the warm breath against his mouth.

“Would’ve done all the work for you,” Quinn purrs. His palm slowly starts sliding lower. Down Eliot’s chest to his stomach. Lower. “Would’ve ridden you however fast you liked.”

“Shit,” Eliot breathes, unable to stop himself. And then he hisses a breathless, “ _Fuck_ ,” when Quinn’s hand slides all the way down to his crotch and squeezes his dick over the denim of his jeans.

“But now I gotta make you pay for pulling that stunt in Abidjan,” Quinn says with a sigh, and then he leans in, just enough for his lips to brush against Eliot’s when he says, “So this is all you get, asshole.”

Quinn squeezes Eliot’s dick one more time, then he’s pulling away and heading towards the door. It takes Eliot a dizzying moment to realize what the fuck Quinn is doing. “Quinn, you fucking asshole—”

“See you around, Spencer,” Quinn says with a wink tossed over his shoulder, then he’s out the door and gone.

Eliot sinks back into his seat with a groan, his pants uncomfortably tight and his lips tingling from the fluttering contact that was full of a promise that wasn’t kept. Fuck, he hates Quinn. He hates that curly haired, attractive as sin, cocktease of a bastard so fucking much.

He hates him even more when he ends up jerking himself off in record time, thinking about the tang of citrus in Quinn’s cologne and the warmth of his hand sliding down Eliot’s chest. 

Eliot decides that getting Quinn arrested isn’t going to be enough, this time.

-

It takes Eliot two weeks to track Quinn down—mostly because he has to spend a thankless five days running an errand in order for a contact to obtain the right intel—to a charming 19th century building in the west side of Marseille’s 8th arrondissement. It’s purely out of respect to the architecture that Eliot doesn’t kick the door to Quinn’s apartment down, and instead opts to knock impatiently on it.

Quinn opens the door with a wary look. He’s not in a suit, but he’s still wearing a blue button-down shirt and tan chinos, which do a very good job of showcasing his thighs. Eliot can make an educated guess that the hand behind Quinn’s back is holding a gun. “Spencer, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Payback,” Eliot says, then hauls Quinn in by the front of his shirt and kisses him.

Quinn gets with the program almost immediately; he grabs Eliot’s shoulder with one hand and pulls him into the apartment, shoving him up against the closed door and licking into his mouth to deepen the kiss. Quinn kisses like he fights: aggressive and impatient and barely allowing Eliot any time to breathe. Eliot lets Quinn take the lead temporarily, just long enough to release his death grip on Quinn’s shirt and instead take Quinn’s hips with both hands and tug him in, grinding up against him just right. Quinn groans into Eliot’s mouth at the contact, and Eliot takes advantage of his distraction to take charge of the kiss.

They end up stumbling deeper into the apartment as they kiss, far enough for Eliot to spot the soft, red couch in the living room area, which is where he manages to shove Quinn onto.

“Not really sure how this counts as payback,” Quinn pants from where he’s sprawled across the length of the couch as Eliot straddles him. He doesn’t resist when Eliot takes the Beretta from him and disarms the weapon, dropping both the gun and the magazine on the glass coffee table before he settles his weight back on Quinn’s hips. “But I’m not complaining.”

“Just wait,” Eliot says, and grinds his ass down, earning a choked expletive in French. “I’m gonna make you beg for it.”

Quinn raises an eyebrow at him. “I’d love to see you try.”

Eliot chuckles and leans down, kissing Quinn deeply one more time before he bites at Quinn’s lower lip. “We’ll see.”

Then he sits up and scoots down to sit on Quinn’s thighs, undoing his belt and the front of his jeans as Quinn mirrors him, undoing his own fly just as Eliot pulls his own cock free. The two of them have to work together so that Eliot can tug Quinn’s pants and underwear down enough to get his cock out, and Eliot takes a moment to appreciate the thick length of it. Eliot knows he’s thicker, but Quinn’s is longer. Eliot feels his mouth water a little at the thought of how good that cock would feel inside of him.

“Just looking at it isn’t gonna make me beg, Spencer,” Quinn says, sounding amused. He’s looking appreciatively at Eliot’s cock, though, so Eliot’s pretty sure Quinn was thinking along the same lines as Eliot was. 

“I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t touch you at all.” Eliot sheds his jacket and drops it to the floor. He strips his shirt off and drops that, too. He can feel Quinn’s fingers twitch against where Quinn’s hands are resting on his thighs. He grins and trails a hand down his chest to his stomach, all the way til he wraps a hand around his cock and pumps it once. “Make you watch me instead.”

Quinn’s eyes darken as they watch Eliot’s little demonstration. “I don’t know, seems a waste for you to come all the way here just to indulge your exhibitionism kink.”

Eliot rolls his eyes, because Quinn’s right. Not to mention that Eliot’s never been a fan of putting on a show for other people. “You’re such a smart-ass. You know that, right?”

“I do have a very nice ass,” Quinn says, which makes Eliot actually laugh. He shifts his position so that his dick is flush against Quinn’s, and then he rolls his hips so that the friction sends a jolt of pleasure up his spine. He repeats the motion on autopilot, and he feels a frisson of satisfaction flicker through him as Quinn’s eyelashes flutter when he closes his eyes and groans. 

He eventually gets a hand around both their cocks as he rocks their hips together, his grip tight as they glide against each other, every drag of skin against skin sending scorching flares of heat through his blood. Quinn’s breathy, cut-off moans mix with Eliot’s own groans as they both grind against each other, Quinn’s hands gripping hard onto Eliot’s hips as they both end up climaxing at the same time. 

“Fuck,” Quinn says, breathless and boneless, melting back into the couch while Eliot grabs a tissue to wipe the splatter of come off his hand. He winces a little at the mess they’ve made of the bottom half of Quinn’s shirt, but he decides it’s not his problem.

He taps Quinn’s bare hip and then tugs at his shirt. “Off. Bed.”

“Right now?” Quinn asks, sounding a little dazed, but he acquiesces easily enough, clearly mellowed out by the orgasm enough to do as Eliot says. He kicks off his underwear and pants as he unbuttons his shirt with a grimace, while Eliot pulls the rest of his clothes off and follows suit, taking a moment to grab what he needs from the pocket of his jacket along the way.

Once they’re in the bedroom, Eliot wastes no time. The bed is a nice one; queen-sized, thick mattress, mahogany bedposts. It’s perfect.

He crowds Quinn up against the head of the bed, kissing him lazily, backing him up until Quinn’s right where he wants him, then he moves fast and handcuffs Quinn’s wrist to the bedpost.

“Spencer,” Quinn says, a hint of a groan in his voice, but Eliot ignores him and simply topples him onto the bed so that he’s laying with his cuffed arm stretched over his head. Eliot straddles him one more time, which makes the scowl on Quinn’s face melt into hungry interest. “You kinky bastard.”

Eliot chuckles, leaning down to whisper against Quinn’s mouth, “You’re gonna have to beg if you want me to uncuff you.”

“Like hell I will,” Quinn whispers back.

“You sure about that?” Eliot pulls himself upright, making sure to settle his ass against Quinn’s soft dick. He rocks his hips, feeling the length of Quinn’s cock rub against the cleft of his ass and reveling in the way Quinn grits his teeth to stifle a moan. “Because it’s gonna be pretty hard for you to fuck me without both hands.”

“Shit,” Quinn hisses, his free hand scrabbling at Eliot’s hip as Eliot repeats the motion, feeling Quinn’s dick twitch and harden underneath him. 

Quinn’s cock feels incredibly good, sliding against his ass, and Eliot can feel his own dick twitching at the pleasant sensation of it. Unfortunately, he’s here to teach Quinn a lesson, so he stops when Quinn is fully hard under him.

“You gonna beg?” Eliot asks, raising an eyebrow.

Quinn, flushed and panting, glares at him. “Fuck you.”

Eliot shrugs. “Suit yourself.” 

He climbs off Quinn and the bed, at which Quinn says, “What the fuck.” It’s only when Eliot is shooting him a shit-eating grin that the realization dawns on Quinn. “Spencer, you son of a bitch.”

“Payback,” Eliot reminds him, then heads back to the living room to pull his clothes on. He deliberately left Quinn enough wriggle space with the cuffs to get out if he dislocates a thumb, but he doubts that Quinn would want to do that before exhausting other options, first. Still, he doesn’t want to test that theory, so he dresses as fast as he can and heads for the apartment door.

“See you around, asshole,” Eliot calls back into the apartment, and leaves while Quinn swears at him.

-

It takes six months for them to cross paths again. 

St. Petersburg is a perfectly nice city, but less so in the dour month of November, when the ruthless chill of Russian winter is settling in and the wind is bitterly sharp. Eliot’s job is to intercept a package that’s being transported by a professional. Apparently, the professional in question has already dispatched two other guys that the client previously hired, so they’re most likely highly skilled and also on high alert. It won’t be an easy job. 

Definitely not easy, Eliot realizes with a low groan when he spots familiar dirty blond curls and a boyish face across one of the many fountains at the Peterhof Palace. Even in the chilly weather, Quinn is simply dressed in a sharp overcoat and suit, the only noticeable concession to the cold being his scarf pulled tight around his neck and the leather gloves covering his hands that hold a black briefcase, which is presumably the package.

Eliot pulls up the hood of his parka and goes around the fountain, careful to seem casual as he moves towards Quinn. There are only a handful of tourists around here today, so he doesn’t have the advantage of melting into the crowd. He’d tail Quinn and try to surprise him in a more secluded area if possible, but he knows that Quinn’s about to do a live-drop on the premises of the palace grounds within the hour, so he knows it’s best to get this done and over with before the package goes into the custody of multiple guards.

He’s five feet away from Quinn when the other hitter turns and sees him.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Quinn says, his hand going straight for the inside of his coat, and Eliot tackles him to the ground.

The fight doesn’t last very long, which is a good thing, given that there’s witnesses and security will come running very soon. He pins Quinn down on the ground with his hips, his left hand grabbing hold of Quinn’s wrist to stop him from reaching his gun, and he manages to wink at Quinn before he punches him hard, knocking him out completely. 

He grabs the briefcase and leaves Quinn unconscious, getting the hell out before security chases him down.

Once he’s delivered the package and confirmed his payment, he gets the first plane ticket out of the damned city before Quinn can hunt him down. Somewhere warm, maybe Mediterranean. 

Italy sounds nice right now.

-

Quinn finds him in Venice three days later.

“If you’re gonna shoot me, keep it to somewhere above my waist,” Eliot says with a sigh when he comes back from dinner to find Quinn sitting in the single armchair of his tiny hotel room. 

There’s an impressive bruise on Quinn’s cheek—probably Eliot’s own handiwork—and his oxfords are scuffed to hell and back, but otherwise he looks as put-together as usual. Eliot can’t exactly tell if he’s wearing the same suit as he was wearing in St. Petersburg, but he can’t help but feel his mouth water a little at the way the charcoal jacket contrasts against Quinn’s black shirt and dark red tie. 

Quinn shakes his head. “I have better plans.”

“What kind?” Eliot asks warily, and then watches Quinn wordlessly strip his jacket off, then undo his tie. He forgets to speak for a moment, and it’s only when Quinn is halfway through unbuttoning his shirt that he recovers his ability to speak English. “Oh, that kind.”

He dithers for a moment, because he’s not entirely sure if this is going to be another occasion where Quinn gets him all worked up and leaves him to his own devices, but then Quinn is rolling his eyes as he undoes his best. “Just take your clothes off, Spencer. I’m not gonna leave you hanging this time.”

“And I’m supposed to take you at your word?” Eliot asks, crossing his arms to make sure he doesn’t start stripping in some terrible Pavlovian response to Quinn’s rapid loss of clothing.

Quinn raises an eyebrow and lets his slacks drop to the floor, leaving him in just his underwear. Eliot feels his throat go dry at the sight. Quinn, clearly sensing his impending victory, smiles. “If you want to be fucked until you can’t walk straight, then yes. You should take me at my word.”

_Oh, fuck it_ , Eliot thinks. He starts shucking his clothes off.

He’s barely finished stripping when Quinn advances on him, naked and half-hard, pulling Eliot in by the back of his neck to kiss him hard and deep. Eliot sighs into the kiss and runs his hands down Quinn’s chest, enjoying the feeling of firm muscles and smooth skin under his palms. He lets Quinn walk him backwards towards the bed as they kiss, shivering as Quinn slides his free hand down Eliot’s back all the way to his ass, tracing his cleft lightly, delving just the slightest bit inwards in a teasing touch.

“Til I can’t walk straight, huh?” Eliot asks as Quinn bullies him onto his elbows and knees. “Pretty ambitious from the guy who got knocked out less than three minutes into a fight.”

Quinn doesn’t bother answering, but he does push a lube-slick finger into Eliot, which shuts him up pretty effectively. The sudden intrusion stings, just a little; it’s been a while since Eliot’s been properly fucked. Surprisingly enough, Quinn doesn’t rush or open him up as roughly as Eliot was half-expecting. He thrusts one finger in and out, slow and easy, until Eliot relaxes into the touch, and then a second finger joins in with more caution than Eliot was bargaining for. It’s not gentle, by any means, but Quinn is clearly thinking of Eliot’s pleasure as much as his own. The thought is more arousing than it should be, and Eliot can’t help but push back into the touch, his cock fully hard by the time Quinn pushes in a third finger.

“I’m good,” Eliot grits out, and shudders a little when Quinn pulls his fingers out, clenching around nothing.

He hears the crinkle of Quinn ripping open a condom wrapper and the low rumble of laughter. “I should just leave you like this.”

“Do that and I’ll break more than your ribs,” Eliot growls.

“At least I wouldn’t be leaving you handcuffed.” The blunt head of Quinn’s cock presses against Eliot’s entrance, and he tenses up a little. Quinn must feel it, because he smooths one hand down Eliot’s lower back. “Relax, darlin’. I’ve got you.”

The words aren’t really reassuring, not from Quinn, who Eliot barely even trusts, but the warm tone that nearly borders on fondness has the tension unspooling from Eliot’s spine. And then Quinn’s sliding in and in and _in_. By the time Quinn is fully inside him, Eliot’s shaking from how full he feels. Fuck, it hurts, just a little, which makes it even better. Quinn must be experiencing a similar kind of revelatory pleasure, because he’s breathing a reverent, “ _Fuck,_ ” from behind Eliot.

Eliot’s barely acclimatized to the sensation of Quinn inside him when Quinn pulls back, nearly all the way out, and then he thrusts back in hard enough that Eliot feels his breath punch out of him. It hurts, and sends such a sharp electric crackle up his spine that he feels like his brain shorted out for a second. “Shit, do that again.”

“My pleasure,” Quinn says with a breathless chuckle, and then he repeats the motion, again, and again. It takes him a few more thrusts from some experimental angles before he hits the spot that makes Eliot’s entire body jolt, clenching hard enough around Quinn’s dick that Quinn swears under his breath. When Quinn thrusts in again at the exact same angle, nailing Eliot’s prostate again, Eliot’s voice cracks on a moan, his hands clutching at the bed sheets with white knuckles. 

Now that he knows where Eliot’s the most sensitive, Quinn starts fucking Eliot in earnest, hard and fast, each thrust making Eliot’s entire body spasm with pleasure, precome dribbling nonstop from his cock. There’s no lull between each spike of arousal, no time for Eliot to breathe and recover; Quinn’s pace is relentless, and every thrust of his hips burns through Eliot’s nervous system like wildfire, until the heat is building up and Eliot feels like he’s going to burst into flames, his skin too tight and his blood too hot. He’s shaking so hard that it’s a miracle he hasn’t collapsed face-first into the mattress already.

Just when he thinks it’s becoming too much, Quinn slides a hand from his hip to Eliot’s groin, wrapping around his cock and pumping it once, twice, thrice—and then Eliot’s coming with a full-body shudder and a choked groan. Quinn fucks him through it, quickly pushing Eliot into oversensitivity, and just when the pleasure wears off and starts edging into pain, Quinn’s hips stutter to a stop as he comes with a bitten-off moan. 

“Fuck,” Quinn exhales, gently collapsing onto Eliot’s back, nearly causing Eliot’s elbows and knees to buckle. He presses a kiss to Eliot’s nape, then to the back of his shoulder. “That was fun.”

Eliot agrees, but he can’t help but say, “Dunno if that’s enough to stop me from walkin’ straight tomorrow.”

“Who said that was the end of it?” Quinn asks, and Eliot feels his dick twitch at the implications. He can feel Quinn grin against his skin, his teeth digging into Eliot’s shoulder. “Ready for round two?”

-

Three months since Eliot woke up to an empty hotel room with bite marks littered across his skin and an undeniable limp that he’d begrudgingly been a little pleased about, he gets in a fight with the Turkish mafia in the streets of Istanbul. It’s partially his fault, really, because he’s already had run-ins with them in the past and he should’ve known better than to take a job on their turf, but they shouldn’t have kidnapped the twelve-year-old son of a shady business magnate.

So he’s fighting his way through a dozen angry Turks in the hideout they’re keeping the kid in when an explosive sound comes from the other side of the wall. All the Turks pause, while Eliot takes the opportunity to knock another one down. Then he hears someone say, “Hey, Spencer! Need a hand?”

When Eliot sees curly hair and a cocky smile at the doorway ahead of him, he grins.

With Quinn, it takes them only ten minutes to take care of the Turks, and then they have pretty much free reign of the place. They make their way through the halls, checking behind each door as they chat. 

“What did you do?” Eliot asks when they bypass the room that ostensibly was where the explosive sound came from. It looks like something blew up in here. 

“Molotov cocktail,” Quinn explains. “So, why exactly are you here?”

“They took my client’s kid.” Eliot checks behind the first door. Nothing’s there. “You?”

“Same deal.” Quinn checks behind a different door, then shakes his head and closes it. “Apparently these guys are doing a lot of kidnappings.”

Eliot shakes his head. “These assholes, they—oh.”

He finds not one, not two, but _six_ kids huddled together fearfully in the corner of a windowless room. Quinn pauses beside him, the back of his hand brushing against Eliot’s, and then he’s slowly speaking in what Eliot can tell is fairly fluent Turkish that they are here to help. The kids look a little hesitant, but then Quinn says somebody’s name, and a young girl perks up, clearly recognizing that this man was sent by her parents. This spurs Eliot into action, too.

“Kasim,” he says, and the boy that he’s been carrying a photo of for the past twelve hours looks at him with wide, hopeful eyes.

From there, they convince the whole group to follow them out, and they take the children to the authorities, watching them go inside the police station before they take their respective child to their clients. 

After that, they end up going out for dinner together, celebrating their joint-victory with manti and kuzu tandir, Quinn teaching Eliot creative new curse words in Turkish with expressive hand gestures. Under the table, Quinn’s ankle deliberately slides up against Eliot’s shin, and in response Eliot fleetingly trails his fingers up the back of Quinn’s hand. 

They end up tumbling into Quinn’s hotel bed twenty minutes later.

“What is it with you and your suits,” Eliot growls, straddling Quinn’s lap as he flings Quinn’s tie over his shoulder and gets to work on the buttons of Quinn’s shirt. “You tryin’ to emulate the CIA or something?”

“The CIA wishes they had my fashion sense,” Quinn retorts, running his hands up Eliot’s thighs and then tugging on the hem of Eliot’s henley. Eliot obediently raises his arms so Quinn can strip it off of him and toss it to the floor. “And are you saying I don’t look good in a suit?”

“I ain’t here to feed your ego.” Eliot pushes the unbuttoned shirt off of Quinn’s shoulders. He takes a moment to note how out of place Quinn’s undoubtedly expensive suit looks inside the dingy hotel room. How Quinn looks entirely too enticing with his bare skin on display and his brown eyes twinkling with mirth as they look up at Eliot. “And I think you’d look a lot better out of that suit.”

“Sweet-talker,” Quinn says in a teasing tone, but starts undressing Eliot faster. 

Soon enough, they’re both naked, kissing hungrily as Quinn reverses their positions so that he’s the one straddling Eliot’s lap. Eliot trails his hands down Quinn’s back, enjoying the way Quinn shivers at his touch, and then brushes his fingertips against the cleft of Quinn’s ass. Quinn breaks away from the kiss with a cut-off moan, and Eliot tilts his head up to brush his lips against Quinn’s one more time as he asks, “Can I?”

“Shit,” Quinn breathes. “Yeah, hold on.” He gets off the bed and goes for what looks like his emergency kit. Eliot has to swallow a laugh when Quinn digs out a small bottle of lube and two condom packets. 

“Somebody’s prepared,” Eliot says, and Quinn rolls his eyes, climbing back onto the bed and resuming his position above Eliot’s lap. 

“You don’t get to make fun of me. You’re the one who carries a spare condom in your wallet.” Quinn drops the condoms onto the mattress and pops the lube open, pouring it onto his fingers.

“We had to resort to using that because you ran out of condoms.” Eliot feels his dick twitch at the very memory of Venice as he rips open a packet and rolls a condom on. He hadn’t been that thoroughly fucked in ages. “You better not expect me to be fucking you more than twice, if this is all you’ve got.”

Quinn smirks. “Well, then you better make those two times count, then.”

Eliot’s about to make a smart retort to that when Quinn reaches back and slides a finger into himself with a shuddery exhale, which promptly wipes Eliot’s higher functioning blank as he watches Quinn finger himself open. It’s not exactly the best angle to see Quinn’s fingers disappear into his ass, but the wet, squelching noises and the dark flush slowly flooding Quinn’s cheeks and neck are a good enough show. Eliot can’t help but reach under Quinn’s fully hard cock, between his legs, pressing his fingertips to the skin and tracing upwards until he meets the wet rim of Quinn’s hole, where his fingers are moving in and out of him. Quinn chokes on a gasp when Eliot presses just the edge of his fingertip in, alongside Quinn’s own fingers. Then he’s pulling his fingers out, his voice breathless as he says, “I’m ready.”

Eliot pulls Quinn in for a kiss, licking into Quinn’s mouth and sucking on his tongue, leaning backwards so that Quinn’s nearly laying on top of him. Then he rolls them over so that he’s pressing Quinn into the mattress.

“Spencer,” Quinn starts as Eliot slicks himself up with the lube, and Eliot interrupts him.

“You can call me by my first name, y’know.”

Quinn blinks up at him. Then he says, very slowly, like he’s testing how the name tastes in his mouth, “Eliot.”

Eliot likes the sound of his name on Quinn’s tongue. “Yeah?”

Quinn blinks once slowly, then he breaks into a sly grin. “Eliot, I want you inside me.”

“Fuck,” Eliot breathes, his whole body going hot at Quinn’s words, mouth going dry at the way Quinn spreads his knees shamelessly. 

“That’s the general idea,” Quinn says.

Eliot grabs Quinn by one knee and shoves it aside, opening Quinn up, then lines himself up and pushes into the tight heat of Quinn’s ass. A low whine catches in Quinn’s throat as Eliot thrusts all the way in, and just when Eliot’s hips are flush against Quinn’s ass, Quinn hooks both ankles behind Eliot’s waist and pulls him in even closer. 

“Come on,” Quinn says, challenging even as his voice trembles a little, “I wanna feel you inside me for days.”

“You’re a fucking menace.” Eliot grabs Quinn by the hips and grinds a tight, dirty circle into his ass, earning a choked moan from Quinn’s mouth. 

He fucks Quinn rough and hard, each thrust making the bed rattle against the wall, and Quinn eggs him on, telling him to go harder, _make me feel it, fuck me like you mean it, I want you to wreck me so hard I can’t sit on hard surfaces for a week_.

By the time Eliot’s found Quinn’s prostate and started fucking Quinn with slow, precise thrusts, still hard enough for the bed to creak dangerously with every move, Quinn’s lost the ability to make smart remarks. Instead, he’s making some marvelously filthy noises that make Eliot’s blood burn with arousal, and clenching around Eliot so tight that Eliot’s head spins. 

When Quinn eventually wraps a hand around his dick and jerks himself off, coming with a full-body shudder, he clenches down hard enough that Eliot groans and comes at the same time.

“Fuck, I’m gonna definitely feel that tomorrow,” Quinn says once he gets his breath back.

Eliot smirks, then holds up the second condom packet. “I remember something about wanting to feel it for more than one day.”

“Fuck,” Quinn says, staring at the condom in Eliot’s hand.

“That’s the general idea,” Eliot says, and then rips the packet open.

Later, once Quinn and Eliot are settled under the covers, sated and sleepy, Quinn curls closeand tucks a stray lock of hair behind Eliot’s ear. Eliot can’t quite make out the look on Quinn’s face in the dim moonlight seeping into the room, but Quinn’s voice is soft when he says, “I’m going on vacation for a few days. Come with me.”

Eliot breathes in, breathes out. This could be a terrible idea. Going on an actual trip with someone he only somewhat trusts is an entirely different deal from hooking up for a night after a job well-done with somebody that he runs into once in a while. Eliot hasn’t trusted another person enough to leave a city with them in a long time. It’s not a light decision to make.

But then Quinn says, “I owe you a honeymoon, after all.”

And for some reason, that’s enough. “Okay.”

He can’t really see Quinn’s expression, but he thinks he hears a smile in Quinn’s voice when he quietly echoes Eliot’s response. “Okay.”

-

Quinn takes Eliot to a luxury resort off the coast of Anse Boileau, where there’s a beautiful beach with white, powdery sand and clear blue ocean stretched for miles. Eliot’s never been to Seychelles before, but Quinn seems familiar enough with the layout of the place, so he lets Quinn take the lead in grabbing them a cab and checking them into a private villa.

“This place is ridiculous,” Eliot says, marveling at the sunken bathtub big enough for two people complete with decking, then at the interior decorated with hammered copper and frangipani. Their villa has three whole pavilions, and the bed is criminally soft. The place has its own _infinity pool_. He hears, fleetingly, that their stay includes a complimentary barbecue prepared by a private chef. 

“Only the best for you,” Quinn says, grinning as he leans in for a kiss.

They have time to kill before dinner, so they take a swim in the pool, which is pretty relaxing since nobody else is around. Then Quinn crowds Eliot against the wall of the shower and drops to his knees. 

“Son of a bitch,” Eliot swears when he discovers that Quinn doesn’t have a gag reflex. Quinn just laughs at him, then proceeds to suck him off lazily, taking his sweet time undoing Eliot with his mouth, until Eliot’s knees very nearly give out underneath him. 

Eliot takes his revenge by sitting in a bathrobe on one of the wide armchairs in the corner of the bedroom, sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows as a naked Quinn straddles his lap, coaxing him into rocking his hips back as he pushes three fingers inside Quinn’s ass. 

“Fuck you,” Quinn hisses when Eliot smacks his hand away from Quinn’s cock, which is dribbling precome messily all over Eliot’s thighs. He grinds back down onto Eliot’s fingers with an air of desperation that’s become increasingly apparent over the past forty minutes. They’ve been at this for nearly an hour now. 

“Later,” Eliot promises, twisting his fingers inside Quinn and eliciting a filthy whine. “Want to see you come just from my fingers first, sweetheart.”

It takes Quinn another fifteen minutes, but he eventually comes with a breathless moan, spilling all over Eliot’s lap and then collapsing onto him, shivering. Eliot presses kisses to drying curls and smooths a hand over Quinn’s back, until Quinn straightens up and kisses him, slow and wet, until Eliot’s hard and aching all over again. Then he pulls Quinn into his lap and straight onto his cock. 

It’s probably the most indulgent sex Eliot’s had in his entire life. 

They spend four days mostly like that. Staying in the villa and having sex in every viable location, including the sunken bathtub and the pool, which Eliot only allows because there’s literally nobody else to see them. They do go out, at least once a day, to maybe take a stroll down the beach or go explore the local area and find something new to eat. But mostly they spend their time in bed, exploring each other’s bodies, occasionally sharing stories about how they got their scars. 

At some point, Quinn discovers the way Eliot’s breath catches in his chest when Quinn speaks French—because of course the local language here is French, dammit—and then proceeds to use it ruthlessly against him, fucking Eliot slow and steady as he talks dirty in French to him, his tone honey-sweet as he says the filthiest things. Eliot’s French isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough to understand every single thing that Quinn says. How good Eliot looks with Quinn’s cock in him, how tight and perfect Eliot is, how he wants to fuck Eliot bare and fill him up because he knows Eliot would look good with Quinn’s come dripping out of him.

Eliot comes just from the thought of that last one.

After four relentless days of learning each other’s bodies inside and out, Eliot and Quinn go to the airport and wait to board their separate flights. Before Eliot leaves first, Quinn looks at him with a smile. “So, that was a pretty good honeymoon, right?”

Eliot looks at the darkening marks on Quinn’s neck, the genuine fondness in Quinn’s eyes, and thinks of the bite marks on his own skin, the warmth inside his chest that would bloom every time he woke up and found Quinn still asleep beside him. “Yeah, it was good.”

Quinn’s smile widens. “Now you owe me a honeymoon.”

“That’s not how it works,” Eliot says.

“It’s how it works for us,” Quinn says, like there’s an _us_ , like the two of them together mean something. 

Eliot doesn’t entirely hate the idea. He shrugs and hefts his duffle bag onto his shoulder, ready to board his flight. “I’ll think about it.”


	3. Chapter 3

Eliot likes London, for the most part. He’s not a huge fan of history, but he can appreciate that there’s a lot of it here. Also, there’s a wide array of choices for good food, even if all of the better choices are non-British cuisines. Plus, it’s an easy city to work in. Plenty of people and tourists, easy to blend in with the diverse crowds. Which is why it’s almost laughable when he spots Quinn easily across the street. In another one of his neatly pressed suits, Quinn looks like he belongs on Savile Row or Canary Wharf, not on the hipster-rich streets of Shoreditch. There are other suited businessmen around, but none of them quite stand out as much as Quinn does.

Or maybe it’s just that Eliot’s awfully good at picking Quinn out in a crowd.

It takes Quinn a little longer to spot Eliot, but soon enough he meets Eliot’s gaze, and Eliot can see the exact moment Quinn resigns himself to a fight.

They end up both heading into a deserted alley by mutual, silent agreement, just to avoid the hassle of civilians getting in the way.

“So,” Quinn says, “I’m guessing you’re also here for the microchip?”

Eliot shrugs. “Maybe.”

“I’d have charged my client more if I’d known you’d be here,” Quinn grumbles, and throws the first punch.

The fight is short-lived; Eliot manages to get in a few good punches, but Quinn manages to land a lucky blow straight into Eliot’s kidney, which hurts like a bitch and makes Eliot stagger just enough for Quinn to crack him hard against the temple and knock him out.

When Eliot regains consciousness, Quinn is gone and the microchip is no longer available for retrieval. However, there _is_ a piece of paper in his pocket. On it, there’s the name of a hotel and a room number. 

Well, it’s not like Eliot’s going to get paid. He might as well take what he can get.

He picks up his stuff from his own hotel, because he knows it’ll be easier that way, then stops by a Boots on the way to grab extra condoms and lube. He’s pretty sure they won’t need that many, but he’s not taking any chances.

It’s only when he’s standing in the hallway of a five star luxury hotel just north of Oxford Circus that he wonders what the hell he’s doing. Quinn literally just knocked him out and made him fail a job. He’s not supposed to come running at the promise of a good fuck. Hell, all he got was a scribbled hotel room number and he came running like he’s desperate for it, like some call girl. And unlike a call girl, he isn’t getting paid for this.

Eliot stews in his frustration for a bit, then shakes his head and refocuses. Business is business. Quinn and him, they’ve somehow reached a mutual understanding that they won’t hold grudges over what happens on the job. What they’ve got going right now is fun. It’s easy. And it’s definitely some of the best sex Eliot’s ever had. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying this.

It’s just that his pride stings a little. He hasn’t been knocked out that fast in a long time. 

But then again, that’s part of the appeal, he supposes. Quinn is very much Eliot’s equal in terms of skill and physicality. There’s a certain amount of fun in fighting and fucking Quinn that Eliot rarely experiences with anybody else.

Feeling a little steadier on his feet, Eliot knocks on the door.

It takes a couple minutes, but then Quinn is opening the door with a wide grin, and Eliot finds himself grinning back before he can even stop himself.

“I lost out on seventy grand,” Eliot says, shoving Quinn backwards into the room, dropping his go bag along the way and kicking the door shut behind him. “You better make it up to me.”

“Well,” Quinn says, dragging Eliot in by his belt loops. Big, warm hands settle on Eliot’s hips as soft brown eyes look into his with a predatory gleam. “I was thinking that as the one who got the upper hand earlier, I should fuck you.”

“Winner takes it all, huh?” Eliot would complain, but there’s nothing about having Quinn fuck him that feels like a loss. To be honest, Eliot really likes Quinn’s cock. Especially when it’s inside him. “Sounds fair.”

Five minutes later, Quinn has two fingers knuckle-deep inside Eliot’s ass as he tries to coax Eliot into folding his legs back even further.

“I’m not as flexible as you are,” Eliot hisses, squirming as Quinn twists his fingers inside him. “I don’t bend that way! Stop trying to turn me into a pretzel and just fuck me already.”

“That’s because you’re old,” Quinn says, and then chuckles at Eliot’s death glare. “Alright, darlin’. Since you asked so nicely.”

Then he’s pulling his fingers out and rolling a condom on, slicking himself up generously with the lube before he pushes Eliot’s knees apart and slides right in. It’s almost too much; there was relatively little prep this time, but Eliot breathes through it, and when Quinn stops, his hips flush against Eliot’s ass, there’s just enough time for him to get used to the sensation of fullness, right before Quinn pulls back out and slams back in.

Quinn fucks Eliot like that for a while. Eliot on his back, Quinn caging him in with both arms and stealing kisses as he rocks his hips forward into Eliot over and over. Then Quinn comes, groaning into Eliot’s open mouth as he does so, and then he crawls down to suck Eliot off. 

After that, Quinn bullies Eliot onto his knees and makes him grab the headboard. In practically no time at all, he’s pushing into Eliot again.

“Your refractory period is fucking insane.” Eliot clutches onto the headboard as hard as he can as Quinn laughs from behind him, kissing up Eliot’s spine all the way to his nape. There, Quinn scrapes his teeth across Eliot’s skin, and Eliot curses at the frisson of pain-edged pleasure it sends through his nervous system. He curses even louder when Quinn digs his teeth hard into the meat of his shoulder. “What are you, a vampire?”

“Not my fault you taste so good, darlin’,” Quinn says, and bites Eliot again, which makes Eliot’s soft dick twitch into half-hardness. “Besides, you like it.” Which is true, but Eliot would never admit it. He resolves to get back at Quinn later by leaving bite marks across the insides of Quinn’s thighs, just like Seychelles.

It takes a while for Eliot to get fully hard again, and by the time that happens, Quinn’s left enough marks on Eliot that there’s absolutely no way he’s going to be able to wear a shirt with a wide collar for at least a week. 

“Jesus fuck,” Eliot swears as Quinn rocks his hips forward, hitting Eliot right where he’s the most sensitive, and he hears Quinn swear breathlessly behind him as Eliot clenches hard. Eliot’s leaking precome all over the bed sheets, and he desperately needs to touch himself—but also, he thinks he’s going to collapse straight into the headboard if he lets go of it. “Quinn, I’m gonna—fuck, I need you to touch me.”

“Say ‘please,’” Quinn teases, and Eliot growls. 

“If you don’t fucking touch me,” he says, “I’m cancelling our honeymoon.”

Quinn laughs, sounding a little surprised, but he gets a hand around Eliot’s aching dick and jerks him until Eliot’s coming with a stuttering groan, and then Quinn comes not long after.

Once they’re both laying on the bed sheets, getting their breath back, Quinn shifts to look at Eliot. The late afternoon sunshine lights up Quinn from behind, turning his curls golden, and Eliot feels his heartbeat stutter a little at the sight. 

“So, honeymoon?” Quinn asks, raising an eyebrow.

It takes a moment for Eliot to remember how to speak. “If you’ve got nothing lined up for the next week—yeah. My turn to take you on one.”

Quinn shifts closer, close enough for Eliot to see the flutter of his eyelashes as he smiles. Close enough that their lips brush when Quinn whispers, “Yeah, take me.”

They kiss, slow and lazy, until Quinn pulls back and quirks a smile at him. “Another go?”

Eliot snorts. “Gimme at least five more minutes.” He bites at Quinn’s lower lip and gives it a tug, then soothes at it with a lick of his tongue. He smiles. “This time, I’m gonna ride you.”

-

They arrive at Singapore late in the night, but Quinn easily recognizes the hotel they arrive at even in the dark. 

“Eliot,” Quinn says, laughing. “I can’t believe you still remembered.”

“I mean, it’s not the same as the one in Prague,” Eliot says as they step into the opulent lobby of the Mandarin Oriental, “but I figured this one’s still pretty damn good.”

It’s a miracle that Eliot managed to reserve a suite on such short notice, especially during a busy time of the year like this, but he managed to pull a couple strings and make it happen. And it’s worth it, to see the gleeful look on Quinn’s face. 

As soon as they’re finally in the privacy of their suite, Quinn presses Eliot up against a wall and kisses him breathless. When they break apart, Quinn is smiling softly in a way that makes Eliot’s chest feel a little tight. “Darlin’, you’re spoiling me.”

“Only the best for you,” Eliot says, almost meaning it, and Quinn kisses him again.

They’ve just come off of a thirteen hour flight which neither of them slept through, though, so they decide that they need to sleep now. They spare a few minutes to admire the view of the bay, then wash up and climb into the king-sized bed together.

It’s the first time, Eliot thinks as he falls asleep to the sound of Quinn breathing evenly, that they’ve shared a bed without having sex beforehand.

When he wakes up, Quinn is still fast asleep, only his curls and forehead peeking out from under the covers, and Eliot ignores the way something in his chest goes soft at the sight.

He lets Quinn sleep in, opting to skim through the room service menu in the meantime. Then he looks through the little booklet that lists recommendations for places to eat or visit during their stay. Eliot’s been to Singapore a few times, just enough to get a grasp of the layout of the city and find a few good spots worth revisiting, but the booklet adds a few good options. Just as he’s finishing up on reading through it, Quinn exhales sharply, shifting so that a bare shoulder emerges from the covers, and Eliot bends down to press a kiss to it. 

“C’mon, sweetheart.” Eliot pulls the covers down a little so that Quinn can’t hide his face under them, which earns him a bleary, affronted look. “It’s almost lunch time.”

Quinn sighs and shuffles forward to hide his face in Eliot’s hip and mumble, “Room service. You choose.”

“You’re turning out to be awfully high maintenance,” Eliot says in near-fond exasperation, but he picks up the room phone anyway.

He orders them a whole feast, ranging from smoked salmon appetizers to a selection of Asian specialty main dishes to seasonal fruits for dessert. By the time the food is there, Quinn is awake and hungry, as Eliot guessed he would be, and they both devour the food, sitting on the private patio attached to their suite.

Once they’re full, they take a shower together, trading kisses and maybe groping each other a little bit, but otherwise behaving themselves. They end up in bathrobes and damp hair, watching the view of the bay under the sunshine, discussing what they could possibly do in the city in their spare time. It’s all terribly domestic, Eliot realizes, and the thought alarms him enough that he decides the only way to rectify this is to have sex with Quinn.

So he grabs Quinn by the belt of his robe and pulls him onto the bed, pressing him into the mattress as they kiss, pulling each other’s robes open and running their hands over warm skin. Eliot fingers him open, slow and teasing, until Quinn is squirming under him, demanding Eliot to fuck him already, his voice hitching as Eliot presses his fingertips to the spot that makes Quinn unfailingly shudder all over. 

“Eliot,” Quinn says in a shaky voice as Eliot finally bottoms out, fully seated inside the snug heat of Quinn’s ass. Eliot rolls his hips in a lazy circle that has Quinn’s thighs squeezing around him. “Go faster.”

Eliot laughs, pulling out and thrusting back in at a leisurely pace that he knows will drive Quinn out of his mind. “We’ve got plenty of time, sweetheart.”

“You fucking tease,” Quinn says, then makes an incredible noise when Eliot grinds into him hard, right where he knows Quinn is the most sensitive. An unbearable amount of arousal floods Eliot’s system at the sound, but he keeps his pace slow and lazy as he fucks Quinn, refusing to go faster even when Quinn hooks his ankles behind Eliot’s back and pulls him in. 

Impatient and desperate, Quinn keeps trying to touch himself, so Eliot ends up grabbing each of Quinn’s wrists and pinning them to either side of his head, pressing them into the mattress with both hands as Quinn squirms and swears at him in a whole slew of languages. He kisses Quinn to shut him up, swallowing Quinn’s curses and trembling sighs, until the only sounds in the room are the obscene squelching noises from where they’re joined together and their moans muffled by wet kissing. 

Eliot rocks his hips forward again and again while Quinn starts shaking under him, coming apart with an arched back and a long moan that Eliot swallows down. Eliot doesn’t stop, even when Quinn twitches from overstimulation, fucking him through the first orgasm and straight into a second one, until Quinn is gasping for breath as he comes completely undone all over again. That’s when Eliot finally lets himself come with a choked groan, buried deep inside of Quinn. 

“You’re a goddamn monster,” Quinn rasps once Eliot rolls off of him, and Eliot can’t help but feel a hot flush of satisfaction when he sees the darkening bruises on Quinn’s wrists.

They spend the whole day lazing around in their suite, talking and flipping through channels on the TV, ordering more food from the room service menu, and then tackling each other onto the bed when they’re feeling frisky. Eventually, they fall asleep in the middle of discussing their hardest past jobs, curled closer to each other than the previous night.

The next four days are laid-back and fun, mostly consisting of Eliot dragging Quinn to various places and making him try a variety of foods. They visit half a dozen hawker centers, eating everything from laksa to biryani to roast duck on rice. They walk through Little India and Kampong Glam and Chinatown, go drinking in Clarke Quay, and even take a walk through the National Gallery so that Eliot can show Quinn how he did a job there a few years back. One afternoon, they pay a visit to Sentosa and sit at an open bar on Tanjong Beach, eating overpriced truffle fries and drinking frozen Piña coladas as they watch the sun go down over the ocean.

When they’re not outside, they’re spending lazy mornings and heat-filled evenings in bed, taking full advantage of the thousand-count bed sheets and soft pillows, leaving marks all over each other’s skin as keepsakes for all the time they’ll spend apart again.

Eventually, it’s time for them to part ways, both of them once again waiting to board separate flights in a beautifully built airport. 

“You can be proud of yourself,” Quinn says, a corner of his mouth quirking up in a familiar smile that Eliot wants to kiss. “That was a hell of a honeymoon.”

_Then maybe you should try to give me a better one_ , Eliot very nearly says. He wants to. He wants to do this all over again with Quinn, but he doesn’t know how to ask for the things that he wants the most, so all he does is give Quinn a crooked smile and say, “We should go somewhere less humid, sometime.”

Quinn’s eyes soften. “Yeah, we should.”

It’s not quite a promise, but it’s the best Eliot can have. It’s enough.

-

Eliot didn’t intend to go looking for Quinn. There’s something dangerous about the way the inside of his chest goes treacherously tender whenever Quinn is in his immediate vicinity—or whenever he remembers Quinn’s smile, his curls, his voice—and he decides it’s safer not to seek out Quinn on purpose. So he simply keeps moving forward, taking jobs and making money and finding other people to fuck so he can soothe the restlessness inside of him. It doesn’t quite work as well as he wants it to, but he makes do.

But now, four months since Singapore, he’s walking fast through the streets of Dubai, trying his best not to break out into a conspicuous run, but keeping his pace as fast as he acceptably can as he follows his intel and traces Quinn’s whereabouts down to a rickety hotel on the outskirts of the gleaming city.

He raps on the door, catching his breath, when Quinn opens the door, looking both pleasantly surprised and confused. “What’s the occasion?”

Eliot glances down both ways to make sure the hallway is clear, then pushes Quinn inside, making sure the door locks behind them before he says, “Jeznach put a hit out on you.”

Quinn stiffens, then shoots Eliot a perplexed look. “And you’re here because—?”

“To warn you, you idiot,” Eliot says with a scowl. “I was offered the job first, but I turned ‘em down. They’ll have probably found somebody willing to take it by now.”

“They offered you the job?” Quinn asks, tucking his Beretta away as he moves towards the desk to collect his emergency kit and throw it into his go bag. “I thought you didn’t take those kinds of jobs anymore.”

Eliot huffs, moving towards the windows to peek through the curtains. They’re too high up for anybody on ground level to see through into the room, and there’s no viable sniper perches from these angles. “They always hope I’ll change my mind.”

“Lucky for me.” Quinn finishes packing up and joins Eliot by the window with an unreadable look in his eyes. “You came all the way here just to give me a heads up?”

“Phone call wouldn’t have been secure,” Eliot says, because it’s true. “And I was close by.”

Quinn looks at him for a moment, then presses a hand to Eliot’s cheek and kisses him, hard and quick. Then, without another word, he leaves.

Eliot’s still in Dubai, three days later, when he hears that Jeznach’s body was found floating down a river. He feels something relax in his gut at the news, then heads to the airport, smiling.

-

When Eliot arrives in Tromsø, he’s not all that happy about it—Norway is _freezing_ in December—but he’s feeling a curl of anticipation in his gut all the same, because when he’d received a text message from a familiar number with nothing but an address on it, there’d been that instinctive recognition that this was an invitation. That this could be something like Seychelles. Like Singapore. 

So he follows the directions to the address he’s been given, which ends up being on the very edge of a beautifully snow-crested fjord. There, he finds Quinn waiting for him in front of what is unmistakably a hotel room masquerading as a glass igloo.

“You can’t be serious,” Eliot says, half-incredulous and half-amused as he walks up to Quinn, who’s grinning hard enough that Eliot’s cheeks vicariously ache. “People can see us sleeping in those, you know.”

“They have curtains for the sleeping area,” Quinn says, opening the door and gesturing for Eliot to step inside.

It’s much warmer on the inside than Eliot would’ve expected, and he feels the chill start to melt from his skin when he feels arms wind around his waist, a wind-chilled nose brushing against his ear as a dry mouth presses a kiss to the side of his jaw. 

“How long do we have?” Eliot asks, begrudgingly admiring the panoramic view of the fjord outside the glass.

“Three nights,” Quinn says, kissing his way down the side of Eliot’s neck, tugging Eliot’s turtleneck down to gain access to the skin there. He almost sounds a little regretful when he says, “I have a job to get to in a few days.”

Eliot turns in Quinn’s arms to capture Quinn’s mouth in a heated kiss, then pulls away with a grin. “Guess we should make the most of it, then.”

It’s still the early afternoon, but they stumble into the bed, shedding clothes and drawing the curtains, because three nights hardly feels like enough time and it’s been two months since Eliot last saw Quinn—hell, it’s been half a year since he last had _sex_ with Quinn—and they’re eager to become reacquainted with each other’s bodies. So they spend hours in bed together, hands roaming over each other’s skin, pressing open-mouthed kisses to every inch of each other’s bodies, taking each other apart until they’re exhausted and spent.

Once they’re satisfied and the sky outside is dark, they venture outside to the hotel restaurant, which is nearly a ten minute walk away, housed in post-modern architecture and decorated lavishly on the inside. They eat kjøttkaker and fish balls in white sauce, try the local beer, and then take a stroll around the area in the dark to appreciate the view of the whole fjord under the starlight.

They go for another round of sex after that, then catch up on what they’ve been up to in the past several months until they fall asleep.

The next morning, Eliot wakes up to find his cock down Quinn’s throat, the other hitter sucking at him lazily as Eliot groans his name and fists a hand in dirty blond curls. Once Eliot comes with a choked curse, Quinn pulls off his cock and smiles mischievously. “Merry Christmas Eve.”

“I’ll take that as my present,” Eliot manages to say, and then shoves Quinn down onto the bed to return the favor.

They spend half the day outside, eating lunch at the hotel restaurant and then exploring the fjord, enjoying the spectacular view under the bright winter sun. It’s cold as hell, but it’s still one of the most beautiful places Eliot’s ever been to, and he doesn’t dare think about how part of the beauty of this place is Quinn smiling at him.

On their way back, Quinn has the bright idea to dump a handful of snow over Eliot’s head, which leads to two grown hitters pelting each other with snowballs until they’re damp and shivering. They go back for an early dinner, warming themselves up with some hearty Fårikål and a bottle of wine before they return to their little glass igloo. They take turns in the shower, as it isn’t big enough for both of them, cranking up the hot water to melt the last of the cold away, and then they both climb into the bed to lazily explore each other with their mouths and hands, slowly working each other up until Quinn’s patience snaps first. 

Quinn’s in the process of straddling Eliot’s lap when Eliot notices that the sky above them has lit up with soft green hues, stealing the very breath from his lungs. 

“Eliot?” Quinn notices Eliot’s slack-jawed staring and he looks up to see the northern lights dancing above them. “Oh.”

They both stare at the sky for a long while, but then Eliot’s attention snaps back to what’s happening in their bed when Quinn starts sinking down onto his cock. Quinn must’ve fingered himself open while Eliot was distracted, but it must’ve been entirely perfunctory, because he’s still too tight, and Quinn is hissing a little as he sinks all the way down. Still, Quinn’s erection doesn’t flag, because he likes pain mixed with his pleasure even more than Eliot does, and soon enough Quinn is riding Eliot’s cock fluidly, rocking his hips down with breathy sighs while Eliot’s hands clench around Quinn’s hip bones.

Quinn moves slow; he usually favors fast and punishing paces, but for now, Quinn moves almost lazily, his hands roving over Eliot’s shoulders as he presses close enough that Eliot can nearly feel the warmth of Quinn’s chest against his own.

“I know I didn’t say it before,” Quinn murmurs, cupping Eliot’s cheek with one hand as he rolls his hips in a way that makes Eliot’s breath stutter, “but thank you.”

Eliot brushes his lips against Quinn’s palm. “For what?”

“For Dubai.” Quinn tilts Eliot’s face up, his breath warm against Eliot’s mouth as he says, “For coming here.”

_How could I not_ , Eliot thinks desperately, his chest too tight, his whole heart wonderstruck by the warmth of Quinn’s body, the sight of the northern lights glowing above them as Quinn moves over him. _How could I not come here when you were the one calling me_.

When they both finally come, Eliot presses a kiss to Quinn’s shoulder and says, “Thanks for asking me to come over.”

After that, they fall asleep and then wake up to a quiet Christmas. They stay in bed, only leaving the igloo to eat pinnekjøtt and whale steak. They don’t talk about it, but they both do their best to memorize each other, to carve every touch and word into their memories as they take each other apart. Even in the moments when they’re too spent to have sex, they curl up together and talk about inane things. Potential jobs, interesting things they’ve learned, recommendations of other places that they’ve been to.

Eventually, the night passes, and then it’s time to leave.

“See you around,” Eliot says, duffle bag over his shoulder, not quite ready to turn away.

Quinn smiles at him, something hesitant in the curve of his mouth as he says, “You know, you can come find me even if I’m not in mortal danger, right?”

Eliot swallows his heart back down from where it’s climbed up to his throat. He smiles. “I’ll think about it.”

-

“When I said that you could come find me even if I’m not in mortal danger,” Quinn hisses as they sneak around a corner in the Jiangning Residential Road District, “I didn’t mean come _put_ me in mortal danger!”

“I said I’m sorry!” Eliot does actually feel bad about this, even if he’s doing a terrible job at apologizing for it. He’d been bored, and it’d been three months since he’d last seen Quinn, and he’d found out that Quinn was doing a job in Shanghai. So he’d figured he might as well invite himself along and help out. Which had actually worked, for a bit, and Quinn had been happy enough to have him join in, but dammit, Eliot hadn’t counted on the guys carrying the package to recognize him from that stint six years ago.

Now the job was blown and they were on the run from a whole crowd of Triad members, so Quinn getting pissed at Eliot was understandable, to say the very least.

“We need to get out of here,” Quinn says as they turn another corner. “Before they call in even more reinforcements.”

“We need a car,” Eliot says as they hit a residential street. Thankfully, there’s a beat up Volkswagen a few feet away, so he breaks the window open with the baton he picked up earlier and opens the door. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of sounding the car alarm and attracting the attention of everybody in the area. 

“What we need is a boat,” Quinn says, climbing into the passenger side seat when Eliot unlocks the door for him. Eliot hotwires the car just as the shouts in Mandarin start coming closer, and then the engine is roaring to life, allowing them to swerve right into the street with a screech. “We should go to Japan.”

“I have a better idea,” Eliot says, and ignores the scathing glare Quinn shoots at him. “I mean I have a contact who can get us out fast. You got somebody who can ship you to Japan in less than an hour without selling you out to the Triads?”

Quinn doesn’t answer, which is answer enough. 

“I hope you like fishing boats,” Eliot says grimly, and floors it towards the harbor.

-

They end up laying low in a bland business hotel near the financial district in Taipei, where they hopefully come off more as foreign professionals on a business trip, rather than two hitters on the run. Usually, the two of them would probably enjoy spending a few days lazing around in a hotel room and fucking, but this time it’s excruciatingly stressful for the both of them. Probably because they’re both stuck in high alert, wary and twitchy, and there’s a difference between staying in one place because you can and because you have to. Also, Quinn is still pissed off at Eliot, so he’s pointedly not joining Eliot on his twin bed.

After a night and whole morning of Quinn snubbing him, Eliot decides that maybe he should apologize more thoroughly. 

“What the hell,” Quinn says flatly when Eliot takes Quinn’s phone out of his hand and tosses it onto the pillow nearby, Quinn is sitting on the edge of his own bed, so Eliot stands in front of him with his arms crossed, wearing nothing but his sweatpants. “If you’re seducing me, you’re gonna need to do a better job than that.”

“Listen, I’m sorry I fucked up your job,” Eliot says, because he knows when to admit that he fucked up. Also, Quinn being mad at him has this weird effect of making Eliot feel the need to grovel, for some unfathomable reason, and it’s messing with Eliot’s head. So he needs to gain Quinn’s forgiveness before he does something horrifying, like actual groveling. “Let me make it up to you.”

Quinn raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t look any less unimpressed, but he’s not dismissing Eliot, either. “What do you have in mind?”

“Dealer’s choice.” Eliot tries not to squirm under Quinn’s gaze, which turns sharp at Eliot’s words. “Whatever you wanna do to me, I’m game. Some stuff are off-limits, but—whatever you want.”

“So,” Quinn says very slowly, “if I told you to blow me and rub yourself off on my leg…”

Eliot’s face burns at the very idea. “I’ll do it.”

Quinn looks at him for a long moment, then smirks. “Turn around and put your hands against the wall.”

Eliot does as Quinn says, feeling a little bewildered, but then he hears Quinn moving behind him. Hears a zip and a crinkle. There’s a pause, and then Quinn’s sliding a hand under the waistband of Eliot’s sweatpants, reaching down and pushing a lube-slick finger into Eliot without a single warning. Eliot tenses up with a sharp inhale, but then he forces himself to relax into the sensation of Quinn pumping a finger in and out of him.

“You’re so impatient,” Quinn murmurs as he adds another finger. “You couldn’t even give me a full twenty-four hours to stop being mad at you. You wanted a fuck that badly?”

Eliot hangs his head to stare at the hotel floor, trying to keep a grasp on his coherency while Quinn fingers him ruthlessly. He can already feel his dick leaking a wet patch into his sweatpants. “Not for a fuck. Just figured—shit—that I messed up and needed to fix it.”

“Do you want to be punished?” Quinn asks, sounding genuinely curious. 

Eliot shakes his head. “Don’t need it. But if you wanna do it—”

“I’m not into punishing people unless they really want it,” Quinn says, and there’s a touch of warmth in his voice again, familiar and so relieving that Eliot shudders a little at how glad he is to hear it again. “But I think this’ll be good enough.”

Quinn adds another finger, and Eliot breathes into the stretch and burn, keeping himself as still as possible. He still can’t stop the fine tremors running through him though, or the twitch of his hips every time Quinn grazes his prostate. Quinn doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t chastise Eliot or compliment him. Simply fingers Eliot open until he pulls his fingers out, and then suddenly Eliot’s sweatpants are being pulled down to pool at his ankles as Quinn’s cock pushes inside of him. Eliot feels his breath punch out of him, his whole body tensing at the sudden intrusion, but then Quinn’s running his hands up and down Eliot’s sides, murmuring, “Breathe, darlin’.”

It’s the familiar pet name that does it, making all the tension drain out of him at once, and then Quinn’s sliding all the way in. It feels so good that Eliot can’t stop the low groan that escapes him at the feeling. 

“I should just fuck you like this and not let you come,” Quinn says, breathing hard as he fucks Eliot fast and rough. “Just make you take it and leave you aching for it.”

Like some common whore, Eliot thinks, and his whole body goes hot at the thought of it. It’s not that he particularly gets off on being used like that, but there’s something about the idea of letting himself be completely at Quinn’s mercy that makes his dick throb. 

“Count yourself lucky.” Quinn pulls out of Eliot, much to his bafflement, and then Quinn’s grabbing Eliot by the shoulder and turning him around, shoving him up against the wall with a predatory grin. “I wanna try something else.”

Eliot doesn’t get to ask what Quinn means by that, because then Quinn’s crouching halfway down, just enough to hook his arms around Eliot’s knees, then he’s _lifting_ Eliot up so that he’s pressed between the wall and Quinn, suspended midair. 

“Holy _shit_ ,” Eliot says, hooking his ankles behind Quinn’s back and winding his arms tight around Quinn’s neck so that he doesn’t fall. 

Quinn laughs, taking a moment to reach precariously down with one hand to adjust himself, and then Eliot is sinking down onto Quinn’s cock. Eliot momentarily forgets what shame is and makes a terrible, filthy noise that he will deny making to his dying day.

Quinn fucks him against the wall like that, nipping at Eliot’s lower lip and grazing his teeth against the skin of Eliot’s neck while Eliot’s cock rubs between their tightly pressed bodies, until Eliot succumbs first and comes with a moan muffled into Quinn’s shoulder. Shortly after, Quinn bites into the side of Eliot’s neck and comes.

“You’re heavy,” Quinn says as they both collapse onto Quinn’s bed. 

“Fuck off,” Eliot says absentmindedly as he reconciles with the fact that he apparently has a kink for being manhandled and fucked against a wall. 

“Hey,” Quinn says after another moment of breathing, “do you think the room next door heard that?”

Eliot blinks. “Oh, fuck.”

After a second of silence, they both burst into laughter.


	4. Chapter 4

“Not again,” Eliot mutters when he and Quinn run into each other outside of a salsa bar in Cartagena. He can tell that Quinn is thinking the exact same thing as they walk up to each other. “Stotesbury Emerald?”

Quinn sighs. “Yeah.”

They size each other up for a moment, and then they’re both heading into the nearest alleyway while Eliot grumbles, “I should just text you my jobs so you can stay the fuck away from them.”

“Now where’s the fun in that?” Quinn asks, turning back to face Eliot. He grins, cocky and challenging in a way that makes Eliot grin back. “Winner takes all?”

“Winner takes all,” Eliot agrees. “And we’re going to mine, this time. Client got me into the Santa Clara.”

“Nice.” Quinn whistles, then throws the first punch.

It takes a while, because Quinn is a fast bastard and slippery as hell, but Eliot manages to eventually grab onto Quinn’s arm when he lands a blow to Eliot’s ribs, and then he knees Quinn hard in the gut, knocking the breath out of him. 

“See you later,” Eliot says, then punches Quinn out.

Two hours later, after Eliot’s delivered a very hefty emerald ring to his delighted client, he returns to find Quinn waiting in the lobby of his hotel, go bag waiting at his feet. 

“So how do you want me?” Quinn asks when they reach Eliot’s hotel room. It’s brightly lit and airy, late afternoon sunlight spilling in through the glass balcony doors, with a king-sized bed that will fit them both comfortably. 

Eliot sits on the bed and gestures at Quinn. “Take your clothes off. Slowly.”

“Seriously? A strip show?” Quinn asks, but his hands are deftly undoing his tie already. “What next, a lap dance?

“Can you do that?” Eliot asks, curious.

“I can, but not very well,” Quinn says. He wanders over to the nearby chair to drape his tie over the back of it. Then he slips out of his suit jacket. “You’ll have to hire a professional for that.”

Eliot watches the way Quinn fluidly disarms each of his guns, one by one, setting them on the table as he shrugs his shoulder holster off. He doubts that any professional stripper could make Eliot’s blood run hot the way Quinn does. “Was thinking of something more hands-on than a lap dance, anyway.”

Quinn smiles at those words and unbuttons his shirt. Eliot watches the slow reveal of bare skin as Quinn strips each layer off, his armor carefully folded over the back of the chair as he eventually slides his slacks down with a shimmy of his hips that has Eliot’s dick paying attention. 

“What now?” Quinn asks, hooking his thumbs into the waistband of his briefs and then pulling them off. Eliot takes a moment to admire Quinn, naked in the sunlight, a few bruises left on him from their fight earlier. He hadn’t been able to appreciate what Quinn looked like under natural lighting when they were in Taipei two months ago, so he drinks in his fill of the sight, until Quinn is looking at him with an amused look, crossing his arms. “You done yet, or do you want me to do a spin, too?”

“On the bed,” Eliot says. He grabs a couple condoms and the lube from his own bag, then tosses them onto the bed while Quinn is climbing onto it. “Knees and elbows.”

Quinn goes down easily enough, putting his ass in the air without hesitation, but this is where the fun part begins.

“Use the lube,” Eliot says. “Open yourself up for me, sweetheart.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then Quinn is asking, “Wait, like _this_?”

Eliot grins. “Yes, like that.” 

There’s a moment where Quinn doesn’t move, but then he’s grumbling under his breath—he’s grumbling in Spanish, Eliot realizes with a sudden burst of fondness—and grabbing the lube, twisting the cap open as he coats his fingers in it. Then, he’s reaching back, tracing the cleft of his own ass before he slides one finger inside of himself.

Eliot admires the view while he stands at the foot of the bed, stripping off his own clothes while Quinn puts on a show. Quinn isn’t shy about fingering himself; he pumps a finger in and out of himself shamelessly, adding a second finger not long after, his breath hitching as small, half-formed moans catch in his throat. He widens his knees to spread himself a little more open, pushing a third finger inside as his cock visibly starts dripping precome onto the bed sheets. 

Eliot climbs onto the bed, settling behind Quinn and watching Quinn finger himself some more before he leans down to kiss down the line of Quinn’s spine, from between his shoulder blades down to the dip of his lower back. Quinn breathes out Eliot’s name shakily at the touch, and Eliot feels his cock ache.

He pulls Quinn’s hand away, allowing Quinn to settle his elbow back on the bed as Eliot lines himself up, then he thrusts inside slowly. Quinn groans softly at the penetration, and Eliot feels his breath hiss out between his teeth. It takes him a moment to acclimatize, and then he starts fucking Quinn in earnest, hard and fast, until Quinn’s making those low whines that Eliot likes, the ones that mean Quinn’s about to come. Then he slows down, which earns him several curse words in at least four different languages. 

“Not yet,” Eliot chides, and moves slow and languid, grinding into Quinn’s ass, slowly working his pace up until it’s hard and punishing once more. 

Just when Quinn’s about to come, he slows down to a near-glacial pace again, which makes Quinn snarl at him. Eliot laughs breathlessly and keeps a tight grip on his self-control, drawing it out over and over until he’s teased Quinn to the brink so many times that Quinn’s cock is steadily drooling precome. Quinn’s limbs are shaking as he swears and threatens Eliot with bodily harm, refusing to cave and beg but still radiating desperation anyway. Eliot feels his self-restraint fray at the edges when Quinn plays dirty and drops from his elbows all the way down, half burying his face in the mattress as he arches his back and clenches down on Eliot’s cock, purring, “Darlin’, I want you to fuck me til I cry.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Eliot hisses, and finally fucks Quinn until they both come.

They spend a minute getting their breath back, Eliot collapsed against Quinn’s back as he kisses the skin there lazily. After a couple minutes, Eliot pulls out and ties off the condom, dropping it into the waste basket. 

Then he asks, “Til you cry?”

“You can _try_ ,” Quinn says, and that’s invitation enough.

-

Time passes in a blur for a while after that. There’s a whole slew of messy jobs that has Eliot losing track of time, and then Quinn must be busy doing his own dirty work, because Eliot can’t track him down at all for a couple weeks. He tells himself that he doesn’t feel weirdly bereft without Quinn’s presence and instead decides that it’s because he misses having amazing sex. Sure, he can find somebody else in the meantime, and he does, several times, but nobody quite measures up to Quinn in bed. Quinn is phenomenal at sucking cock, ridiculously flexible in a way that makes Eliot’s blood burn, and has a refractory period that would make a porn star jealous. It’s hard to find anybody who looks as attractive as Quinn does when he glances up at Eliot through his lashes while he’s sucking Eliot off, or somebody who feels as good around Eliot’s cock as Quinn does when he’s riding Eliot slow and lazy. Nobody quite gives him that heady satisfaction as Quinn does when he’s fucked out and breathless, curling up against Eliot. 

And maybe Quinn is the only person who makes Eliot feel unbearably fond when he’s still asleep next to Eliot in the morning. Nobody else has to know about that.

So it’s been four months since Cartagena, and Eliot’s been feeling a little hollow on the inside, pretending that it’s just a matter of finding the right person to fuck, when somebody knocks on the door of his safehouse in Seoul.

He tenses, grabbing a knife from the coffee table and silently moving towards the front door of the small apartment. Then he peers through the peephole, and mutters, “What the hell?”

Eliot opens the door to find Quinn smiling sheepishly at him, bruises darkening on one cheek, one arm cradling his ribs, missing a necktie from his usual getup and looking like he was kicked while he was down.

“Hey, I hope you don’t mind if I crash at yours for a bit,” Quinn says, and Eliot smells the blood before he even sees the dark red seeping into Quinn’s shirt beneath the suit jacket.

“Shit, get in here.” Eliot ushers Quinn inside, takes a moment to check the hallway is clear, then closes the door and locks it. Quinn is limping, clearly trying his best not to put his weight on his left leg, and Eliot briefly thinks that whoever did this better be already dead. “I’m not even gonna ask how you knew I was here.”

Quinn smiles as he takes a seat on the leather couch and drops his go bag on the floor, and fuck, he looks a little pale. Eliot peels the jacket back to check how much blood there is and winces at what he sees. “Was kinda hoping to surprise you with a fun visit.” He grimaces as he starts taking his jacket off. “Some guys from my previous job decided they’d surprise me first.”

“Did you at least take care of ‘em before coming here?” Eliot asks, walking into his bathroom to grab his emergency kit. 

“None of ‘em are gonna bother me again,” Quinn says in a breezy tone, but when Eliot emerges from the bathroom, his hands are unsteady as they unbutton his shirt. “I made sure of that.”

“Good,” Eliot says curtly. He helps Quinn peel the shirt off so that he can get a good look at what is obviously a bullet wound. He checks Quinn’s back and feels mildly relieved that it’s a clean through-and-through. He really doesn’t want to have to dig a bullet out from Quinn’s side when he doesn’t even have proper anesthetics. “How long ago were you shot?”

“Over an hour ago,” Quinn hedges. Pauses. “Maybe two hours.”

Quinn’s lost a lot of blood, but not enough to endanger his life, from what Eliot can tell. Satisfied that Quinn isn’t going to need a transfusion, Eliot gets to work. He stitches Quinn up, confirms that Quinn’s ribs are bruised but not broken, then takes a look at what looks like a nasty ankle sprain that’s going to need some ice.

Once he’s done inspecting Quinn for injuries, Eliot shoves him in the shower to clean himselfup. In the meantime, Eliot reheats the leftover jokbal and egg rolls from his dinner last night. He grabs the spicy buckwheat noodles from the fridge, too.

Quinn emerges from the bathroom naked, a few minutes later, making a beeline for his go bag so he can pull out fresh underwear and a pair of sleep pants. The fact that he’s foregoing a shirt tells Eliot that Quinn’s hurting enough to not want to pull one on. 

They eat their lunch at the tiny dining table right beside the kitchen, after which Eliot bullies Quinn into taking painkillers and sleeping in Eliot’s bed while Eliot cleans up and does the dishes. Later, he has a wealth of Chinese-style Korean food delivered to his door, including jjajangmyeon and tangsuyuk and dumplings, then wakes Quinn up so they can gorge themselves on the food. That night, they catch up with each other as Eliot traces idle patterns on Quinn’s bare skin and Quinn rests one hand against Eliot’s chest, until they fall asleep like that.

They spend most of the next day simply lazing in bed, Quinn still recovering and dozing while Eliot sits against the headboard and reads, one hand brushing absentmindedly through Quinn’s curls. For lunch, Eliot cooks kimchi fried rice and a couple Korean side dishes he’d been meaning to try out, and for dinner they order fried chicken and beer to go with it. It’s the first time they spend a full day with each other that doesn’t involve sex of any kind.

Of course, that means the next day, after Quinn walks out of his morning shower, the first thing he does is get on his knees and give Eliot a very thorough blowjob. 

In return, Eliot takes Quinn to bed and spreads him out on the bed sheets, kissing and licking every inch of Quinn’s bare skin that he can reach, carefully mouthing his way down Quinn’s stomach and giving the bullet wound a wide berth. Lifting Quinn’s sprained ankle and pressing a kiss to it. Rolling Quinn onto his stomach and pressing open-mouthed kisses down Quinn’s spine, until he’s pressing his mouth to Quinn’s hole, licking him open as Quinn gasps into the bed. He spreads Quinn open with his thumbs and eats him out until Quinn’s trembling all over, moaning into his fist and saying Eliot’s name in a breaking voice. It takes nearly a full hour for Quinn to finally come just from Eliot’s tongue inside him, and Eliot’s jaws ache from the strain, but it’s worth it to see Quinn boneless against the bed sheets, flushed and incoherent as he recovers from the onslaught of pleasure.

That’s how they spend three more days, lazy and indulgent in each other’s company, until Quinn’s ready to leave and Eliot gets a job offer on an entirely different continent. Quinn leaves the apartment first, and it takes a while for him to go, because they can’t stop kissing each other. Quinn kisses Eliot like he doesn’t want to leave, like he wants to get lost in Eliot’s mouth and never find his way out, and Eliot kisses him back like he doesn’t want to let Quinn go. 

It’s not enough, it never is, but eventually Quinn pulls away with a bruised mouth and soft smile. He presses one last kiss, brief and chaste, against the corner of Eliot’s mouth, and then he’s leaving with a quiet, “See you around, darlin’.”

Eliot looks at the closed door for entirely too long, then turns back to clean the apartment one last time before he leaves.

-

When they run into each other three and a half months later, it’s a complete coincidence.

“For the record,” Quinn says when Eliot groans at the sight of him in front of the Bellagio’s fountain, “I already finished my job today morning.”

Eliot squints at him. “So, you’re not here for the Koons?”

“Hell no.” Quinn gives him a quizzical look. “Aren’t Koons sculptures too big to deal with, anyway?”

“Yeah, you’d think so,” Eliot says darkly. 

Quinn gives him a perplexed look, but doesn’t dig deeper. Instead, he leans against the railing and says, “Where are you staying?”

“MGM Grand.” The nice thing about Las Vegas, Eliot thinks, is that the good hotels are relatively cheap. The real money is in the casinos, after all. “You?”

“Mandalay Bay.” Quinn hums. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning for another job, though. So mine is only booked for tonight.”

Eliot checks the time. He has a little less than twenty minutes until he has to be at the loading dock where he’ll be intercepting the sculpture. “Here, you can use this.” He hands over his hotel keycard. “Room 914. I gotta go now.”

Quinn takes the keycard with a grin. “Have fun stealing a balloon animal.”

“It’s a different one,” Eliot says, and leaves.

He returns to the hotel room nearly three hours later, forty minutes before midnight. Quinn’s already naked, lounging in a bathrobe on the bed, and when Eliot strides into the room, he pounces and captures Eliot in a kiss.

“I have to leave in less than ten hours,” Quinn says after they break apart. His hands are already on the buttons of Eliot’s flannel shirt. “I want to come at least three times before I leave.”

Eliot undoes his belt. “I think we could aim a little higher than that.”

It takes them less than four hours to rack up a combined total of nine orgasms. Eliot may or may not have pulled a muscle in his back.

“We should run into each other like this more often,” Quinn says as they lay under the covers, facing each other even though they can barely see in the dark. “Get our own jobs done. Meet up and fuck afterwards.”

Eliot snorts. “Yeah, because we can actually plan that out. Put it on our calendars and everything.”

“We could make it work, if we really wanted,” Quinn points out, and there’s something in the way he says those words quietly that makes Eliot’s heart squeeze so hard in his chest that it hurts. 

“It’d be a lot of work.” Eliot doesn’t dare admit that maybe he wants this. That he might want to put in the effort to make this thing work.

Quinn is quiet for a moment. Then: “Do you have a home?”

Eliot blinks slowly, trying to process the shift in topic. “Like, where I grew up?”

“No, just.” Quinn exhales and shifts closer, the back of his hand touching Eliot’s. For a moment, Eliot’s tempted to take that hand and hold it. He wonders how Quinn would react. He wonders which would be worse: Quinn snatching his hand away or Quinn holding on. “I don’t have a place I stay in permanently, y’know? Bunch of safehouses, yeah, but I don’t really have a place I call a home.”

Eliot understands. It’s nearly impossible to have a single place to call home in their line of work. Nearly impossible to find a place to feel safe in, to feel anchored in. “I don’t have one, either.”

“I’m not really into settling down anyway.” Quinn’s knee nudges against Eliot’s under the covers. Resting against it, a warm point of contact. “But a home doesn’t have to be a place.”

Eliot’s heart is in his throat, the implications squeezing around his ribcage until he feels his bones creak. “Home’s a hard thing to find, for people like us.”

“It’s a hard thing to be,” Quinn says, and Eliot agrees. Honeymoons, fleeting escapes, single nights of fun—those are easy, compared to stability and commitment. And he doesn’t know if this thing between the two of them would survive if it stopped being easy.

“Don’t need a home.” Eliot leans forward, until his forehead is pressed against Quinn’s. “We can find each other when we need to.”

_I don’t need a home when I have you_ , he thinks. It’s a terrifying thought.

But as he kisses Quinn, slow and chaste, he knows it’s true.

-

Eliot’s sitting in Le Salon Rose in the Monte Carlo when Quinn slides into the seat across from him. The look on Quinn’s face is deliberately casual, and that’s how Eliot immediately knows that something’s up.

“What’s wrong?” He asks in a low tone, careful to keep his body language relaxed. Eliot finished a job here just a day ago and he was planning on sticking it out for a couple more days in the luxury of Monaco before moving on, so there’s no way Quinn’s here to compete on a job. 

“Your client is selling you out,” Quinn says. “The Unione Corse wants your head for what you did two days ago.”

Eliot swears under his breath, feeling a wordless fury simmer in his blood. Oh, he’s going to have to teach Bouchard a lesson or two later. For now, he needs to dodge the immediate bullet that is one of the most secretive and influential French mafia clans coming after him. “You came from Marseille?”

“Was planning on having a boring vacation,” Quinn says dryly. “I figured I could use some excitement.”

Eliot feels the inside of his chest go a little warm at the thought that Quinn came here to risk his life in order to save Eliot’s. Unfortunately, there’s no time to bask in the appreciation, because there’s a very real chance of him getting murdered today, so he rises from his seat and offers Quinn a smile. “Alright, wanna go help me clear things up with the French mafia?”

“Thought you’d never ask.” Quinn stands up, impeccable in his deep blue suit and matching tie, looking like a man ready to walk on the red carpet. For once, Eliot’s dressed smartly as well—he’s wearing a black sports jacket and a red dress shirt underneath—and Quinn gives him an appreciative once-over before they start heading for the exit. 

They’re barely fifteen minutes out of the Monte Carlo when four men in black suits start following them. Eliot trades glances with Quinn, who raises an eyebrow and mouths _Sydney_. It’s remarkably telling, Eliot thinks, that the two of them can communicate a plan just as easily as this, based on a shared memory from nearly four years ago. He can’t help but feel a sharp flare of satisfaction in how well they understand each other, then he pushes it away in favor of giving Quinn a wink. Then, the two of them split up.

As expected, the suited men follow Eliot rather than Quinn. It isn’t long until another handful of men join in, and Eliot waits until a gaggle of tourists are passing by to duck and run. 

The men start running in pursuit, and Eliot leads them the long way around towards Port Hercule. He’s nearly there when he hears gunfire, and he leaps and rolls to the nearest cover, peeking out to see mafia men go down one by one as they’re shot through the kneecaps, shouting in pain and confusion.

Eliot uses the chaos to grab a long piece of wood and advance towards the Union Corse members, and everything gets a little messy from there. Eliot narrowly avoids getting shot at one point, and Quinn eventually joins the fray to make sure Eliot doesn’t get overwhelmed. Which, Eliot had it handled, thank you very much, but he appreciates the sight of Quinn fighting fast and sharp in his suit—it’s been a while since he’s been able to admire that without being on the receiving end of Quinn’s violence—so he’s not exactly complaining.

Eventually, they manage to convince the Union Corse to not actually murder Eliot, and in turn, Eliot promises to recover the goods he took from them on behalf of his client. 

“That could’ve gone worse,” Eliot says as they tumble into his hotel bed forty minutes later, and Quinn snorts.

“I can’t believe we got away with threatening the goddamn Union Corse.” Quinn sighs and tugs on the lapels of Eliot’s sports jacket. “I kinda want to fuck you while you’re still wearing this.”

Eliot raises an eyebrow, then tugs Quinn in by the necktie for a kiss before he says, “Only if you keep your suit on.”

Which is how Eliot ends up straddling Quinn’s lap, his bottom half naked but still wearing his dress shirt and jacket while Quinn is fully clothed except for his dick pulled out from the open fly of his slacks, sinking down onto Quinn’s cock with a low groan. Quinn runs his hands greedily up Eliot’s chest, pausing to thumb at a hard nipple over the fabric of Eliot’s shirt to provoke a hissed curse. Then he’s framing Eliot’s face and pulling him in for a hungry kiss as Eliot clenches around Quinn’s cock.

There’s still remnants of adrenaline left in their systems from the fight, and the delectable sight of Quinn in his suit adds fuel to the fire, which leads to Eliot riding Quinn fast and rough, smoothing his hands over Quinn’s jacket, marveling at the luxurious quality of the fabric as he leaks precome all over the bottom of Quinn’s expensive dress shirt. 

“You should dress up nicely more often, darlin’,” Quinn says gripping Eliot’s hips hard as he thrusts upwards to meet Eliot when he rocks his hips down. He kisses his way up Eliot’s neck as he murmurs, “Or maybe not. I’d just want to fuck you in public all the time.”

Eliot laughs and tips his head back to allow Quinn better access to his throat. “You don’t wanna fuck me when I’m wearing regular clothes?”

“There’s a difference between wanting to fuck you in general and wanting to fuck you so badly you’re willing to do it in a public bathroom,” Quinn says grinding hard up into Eliot in a way that makes Eliot shudder. “Do you know how good your ass looks in those pants?”

“You startin’ to understand how I feel around you all the time, huh?” Eliot rolls his hips nice and easy, reveling in feeling Quinn thick and hard inside him as the blunt head of his cock presses against Eliot’s prostate. He can’t help the way his hips twitch or the way his voice hitches at the sudden jolt of pleasure. “You and your fucking suits.”

Quinn chuckles, grazing his teeth against Eliot’s jaw. “Maybe next time, you should just bend me over and fuck me. Just pull my pants down halfway and fuck me like that.”

“Jesus christ,” Eliot groans, heat spiking through him at the mere thought.

Quinn keeps talking to him, low and dirty, switching to French halfway through just to make Eliot clench down on him with a sharp inhale, and then Quinn’s pulling Eliot’s hair and murmuring that he’d let Eliot do anything to him. “Tout ce que tu veux, mon chéri,”

Eliot breath stutters out of him at the words, and then he’s coming with a choked moan, and Quinn’s coming with a muffled curse soon after.

They catch their breath for a long while, Eliot rolling off of Quinn to flop over onto the bed before they go for another round. And just before Quinn presses a hand to Eliot’s chest and leans in for a kiss, Eliot wonders which words he’d found more irresistible: _anything you want_ or _my darling_.

-

It takes two weeks for Eliot’s patience to crumble. He’s been haunted by Quinn’s words, by the treacherous fondness that has been seeping into his chest for a long while, flooding through him at the realization that somehow he and Quinn have been circling each other for years now. That they’ve become _something_ together, even though he isn’t quite sure what they’ve become.

So he waits, resists, and eventually gives in and tracks Quinn down to a beautiful beachside hotel in Casablanca, where he decides to steal Quinn’s modus operandi and break into his hotel room while Quinn is absent.

When Quinn returns, presumably from a job well-done, going by the relaxed set of his shoulders, Eliot’s waiting for him with a smile and a quote. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world.”

“I used that on you before,” Quinn says, a smile creeping onto his otherwise tired face. “In Prague.”

Eliot remembers. It’s why he thought it was hilarious to find Quinn in this city, of all places. “Figured this was the right place to use it.”

“It definitely is,” Quinn agrees as he strips his suit jacket off. Eliot’s already down to just his undershirt and jeans, leaning up against the headboard of Quinn’s hotel bed, but he watches the exhaustion in Quinn’s posture and eyes, then makes the deliberate choice to not move an inch, and instead raise an eyebrow when Quinn throws him a puzzled look.

“You look like you could use a nap,” Eliot says, and Quinn pauses from where he’s been unbuttoning his shirt. 

“Do I look that bad?” Quinn asks with a chuckle, abandoning his shirt buttons and instead toeing his shoes off and climbing onto the bed. 

Quinn always looks good, in Eliot’s opinion. Even when he’s been shot, kicked to hell and back, or even just dressed in an oversized shirt and sleep pants, he’s still the most beautiful thing Eliot’s ever seen.

He doesn’t say any of that, though, and instead says, “I ain’t gonna fuck somebody who looks like they’ll fall asleep in the middle of sex.”

“It’d be your fault for not being good enough to keep me awake,” Quinn says, but his smile is soft as he leans in and kisses him, gentle and sweet in a way that has Eliot’s heart clenching in his chest. 

They kiss for a moment, and then Quinn’s breaking away, pulling up the covers to crawl down under them and settle his head down on the pillow beside Eliot’s hip. Eliot brushes his fingers through Quinn’s curls, and he’s pretty sure Quinn melts a little into the bed at the contact.

“Wake me up in ninety minutes,” Quinn murmurs, and soon he’s fast asleep.

Eliot spends those ninety minutes mostly thinking, looking down occasionally to observe thehaphazard curls against the pillow and the length of Quinn’s lashes fanned out against his cheeks. He’s been thinking a lot about Quinn, lately. About a conversation they had back in Las Vegas. Whether this thing they’ve become means something more than just good sex and friendly competition and fun. If they could be something more, something almost like home.

When ninety minutes have passed, Eliot strips the bed covers off the bed and rolls Quinn onto his back, kissing his cheek and then making his way down his jaw and neck, unbuttoning Quinn’s shirt and unbuckling his belt. Quinn wakes slow and easy, arching into Eliot’s touch as he kisses his way past Quinn’s sternum and down his stomach. 

By the time Eliot’s shoved Quinn’s pants and underwear halfway down his thighs and got his mouth around Quinn’s cock, Quinn’s fully awake.

“Shit, Eliot,” Quinn rasps, his voice still rough from sleep, and Eliot feels his dick twitch at the sound of it. A hand winds its way through Eliot’s hair, tugging lightly, careful not to pull too hard. “I’m not gonna—fuck—won’t last long.”

In response, Eliot just sucks Quinn harder, and it takes Quinn less than five minutes to come with a low whine.

“Fuck,” Quinn says shakily as Eliot pulls Quinn’s pants and underwear all the way off. Then, he strips off his own clothes, setting himself between Quinn’s legs and popping the cap off the lube. “Right now?”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, and slides two slick fingers into Quinn. He’s developed a bit of a thing for fucking Quinn immediately post-orgasm, mostly because he loves the way it drives Quinn wild, overstimulated and overwhelmed, clutching onto Eliot like his life depends on it as Eliot fucks him into hardness all over again. “You take it so good, sweetheart.”

Quinn’s so easy to finger open like this, pliant and relaxed. Easy to push his cock into in one slow thrust, watching the way Quinn tips his head back with a choked whimper. Easy to fuck, rocking his hips slow and nice while Quinn shudders at every drag of Eliot’s dick inside of him, murmuring Eliot’s name in between shuddery sighs. It’s so fucking easy and Eliot wants to have this thing between him and Quinn, wants to keep it so badly.

He fucks Quinn into another orgasm before he comes himself, then he takes a moment to breathe and pull out of Quinn, tying off the condom as he tries to slow down his heartbeat. Trying, as hard as he can, to banish the terrible need clawing at his chest, the greedy desire to hold Quinn down and never let him go.

When he gets his breath back and his feelings are somewhat back under control, Eliot leans down to kiss Quinn, wet and slow, working up the nerve to say something that just might convey how serious he wants this to be. 

“Listen,” Eliot finally says, and Quinn blinks up at him curiously. “I’ve got a job that’s gonna take a couple weeks soon, but after that…you got anything lined up?”

“I might need a few weeks for a job in Tashkent,” Quinn says, his fingertips tracing nonsensical patterns against Eliot’s skin as he speaks. “But like, give me a month? I should be free then.” He quirks a small, almost hopeful smile at Eliot. “Why, you got plans?”

“Was thinking we could go somewhere warmer than Norway,” Eliot says.

Quinn’s eyes soften at the memory. “Sounds nice to me.”

This is the easy part. Now comes the hard part. 

Eliot swallows. “Look, remember what—we’ve brought it up a few times before and I was thinking…” Fuck, he’s terrible at this. Quinn is looking at him with an expression that’s half exasperation and half amusement. Eliot sighs and just jumps off a metaphorical cliff. “Do you wanna get tested?”

“Tested?” Quinn parrots back, perplexed. Then his eyes go wide as he catches on to what Eliot means. “Oh.” He licks his lips in a subconscious gesture, then says, “Yeah, okay. I’m game.”

Eliot releases a breath he hadn’t been aware he’d been holding. “Right, well. Okay.” He leans in and kisses Quinn one more time, then decides that he needs to change the subject before he can say something irreversible. “The window over there.” He indicates the floor to ceiling window at the other end of the room. “No sightlines into it. Too high up for anybody on ground level to see.”

“Yes, and?” Quinn raises an eyebrow.

Eliot grins. “Wanna get fucked against it?”

Eliot is by no means an exhibitionist—he prefers to keep certain things private—but he knows Quinn gets off on danger, including the thrill of somebody potentially seeing him mid-fuck. The way Quinn’s pupils dilate at the very idea is a good enough answer. 

“Right.” Eliot presses a quick kiss to the corner of Quinn’s mouth, then pulls him upright. “Go put your hands against the window, sweetheart.”

Watching Quinn go towards the window, his dress shirt still clinging to his shoulders enticingly, Eliot takes a deep breath and expels it in one go. He can worry about what it means to get tested with Quinn later. Right now, he can focus on this.

-

Noboribetsu is gorgeous in May, warm and full of the scent of fading spring. Eliot’s never been to this particular city before, but he’s been to Hokkaido enough times to know that the best Japanese hot springs can be found here. 

He’s picked a smaller, exclusive luxury ryokan with fewer available rooms, purely so that they can avoid the bustle of an overcrowded onsen, and the whole place is beautifully quiet, surrounded by nature and the scatterings of other ryokans a couple miles away. Eliot’s arrived first, and he’s inspecting the room when he hears footsteps outside the suite. Soon enough, he hears a knock, and then a staff member opens the door and lets Quinn inside. 

Once the door is closed again, Quinn drops his bag and steps closer with a smile. “I’ve been told that we have our own private onsen attached to our suite.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty big,” Eliot replies, just as Quinn crowds against him. He tilts his head and whispers against Quinn’s lips, “Only the best for you.”

Then Quinn’s licking into his mouth, and Eliot’s groaning softly into the kiss as he pulls Quinn in closer. It’s been only a month since Casablanca, but it still feels like forever ago, because now things are a little different. There’s something new on the horizon for the both of them.

He breaks away from the kiss and then pulls out the piece of paper he’s had folded into his back pocket for the past thirty minutes, and Quinn takes the paper and reads it. 

“I’ve shown you mine,” Eliot says, pretending his heart isn’t pounding in his throat, and Quinn laughs softly, going to his bag and unzipping it, digging out a piece of paper then holding it out to Eliot. Eliot reads it and finds the results satisfactory, though he does raise an eyebrow at the name listed on the top. “Rick Blaine? Really?”

“I thought it was fitting,” Quinn says with a grin, loosening his tie. “Now, how do you want me?”

Eliot smiles, tugging Quinn in for another quick kiss before he says, “I could use a bath. Wanna try out the private onsen first?”

Quinn hums. Neither of them are in a hurry; they have a whole week to spend here, after all. “Alright.”

The private onsen is, for lack of a better word, _fantastic_. There’s a sense of serenity in the moderately wide space carved out beside their suite, warmth seeping into Eliot’s bones as the hot water works its magic, helping the tension bleed out of his muscles. Quinn seems similarly relaxed, folding his arms above the deck next to the onsen and resting his chin atop of them, humming happily. They chat about what they’ve been up to in the past month, trading stories about their most recent jobs, and then they discuss previous occasions when they’ve been to Japan before. Quinn’s been to Hokkaido only once, prior to this trip, and he’d been too busy transporting a package to stop and enjoy the hot springs. While Quinn’s been to an onsen before, just the once in Osaka, he didn’t actually stay at a ryokan for the experience. Which means that this is Quinn’s first time at a place like this.

Eliot intends to make this a hell of a first time, in a lot of different ways.

Eventually, they drift closer to each other, their conversation derailing as they start kissing, sliding wet hands over damp skin, and by the time Quinn’s reaching a hand down to squeeze Eliot’s dick, they’re both fully hard.

As fun as getting off in the onsen might sound, Eliot’s waited long enough to see Quinn and fuck him properly. So he pushes Quinn’s hand off and drags him out of the water.

They towel off quickly and head towards the bedroom, which has two queen-sized Western-style beds. Eliot had considered taking one of the fully Japanese-styled suites with the futons, but he’d figured that having a proper mattress would be more comfortable, given how enthusiastic they both tended to get.

“So, how are we doing this?” Quinn asks. He looks relaxed, but there’s just the slightest hint of nervousness in the hesitant curl of his smile, and Eliot thinks that he wants to spoil this man. To ruin him so utterly that nobody could come close to matching Eliot in Quinn’s life. 

Eliot’s already been ruined by Quinn anyway. It’s only fair that he returns the favor.

“You on your back,” Eliot says. He crowds against Quinn, sliding a hand around the curve of Quinn’s ass and stroking down the cleft of it, brushing his fingertips against Quinn’s entrance as he breathes against Quinn’s mouth. “Wanna see what you look like when I fill you up til you’re dripping, sweetheart.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Quinn purrs, and then they’re kissing, working their way towards the bed, grabbing the lube on the way. Then Quinn’s on his back, lifting his hips a little for Eliot to stuff a pillow under them so he can finger Quinn open more easily. 

In no time at all, Quinn’s squirming, clenching around Eliot’s fingers and saying, “I’m ready, I’m ready, get inside of me, c’mon—”

In any other situation, Eliot would draw it out and tease Quinn to the brink, but fuck, his self-control is tenuous at best right now and he’s wanted this for so long that he can’t wait any longer, either. So he slicks himself up and presses the head of his cock against Quinn’s entrance, takes a deep breath, and then pushes in.

“Fuck,” Eliot gasps, and Quinn echoes the sentiment. Quinn is so tight and hot and _perfect_ around Eliot’s cock in a way that feels just a little more visceral without the thin layer of latex to separate them. He feels like his blood is too hot under his skin, his whole body burning with arousal as he momentarily forgets how to think. All he remembers is how to _move_ , so he does exactly that: grinds hard into Quinn’s ass, watching the way Quinn tips his head back and swears in a shaky voice, then he pulls out halfway and slams back in. 

He fucks Quinn in a slow rhythm with hard, punishing thrusts that have Quinn’s thighs squeezing around Eliot’s waist, Quinn’s voice breaking on low moans with every movement. Eliot’s grips Quinn’s hips so hard that it must hurt, but it only makes Quinn arch his back and moan louder. 

“Shit,” Quinn gasps, his voice cracking open when Eliot hits his prostate, his whole body clenching at the stimulation. One of Quinn’s hands fly up to muffle his mouth with the back of his hand, covering the lower half of his face, which is something Quinn’s never done before. He can get loud sometimes, but he’s never been particularly shy about it; Quinn is pretty damn shameless, especially in sex, so this is new. And not what Eliot wants, because he wants to see Quinn’s face properly. Wants to hear every sound Quinn makes. So he lets go of Quinn’s hips to grab Quinn’s hand and wrench it away from his mouth, then grabs the other hand too, pinning both hands to either side of Quinn’s head. “Fuck, Eliot.” Quinn squirms. “Seriously?”

“Don’t get shy on me now.” Eliot rolls his hips in a tight circle, provoking a low whine. “Wanna see you properly when I come inside you.”

Quinn flushes, the way he usually does when he’s getting close, and Eliot watches every flutter of Quinn’s lashes and every bite to Quinn’s lower lip, until Quinn’s coming with a breathless moan, his gaze locked onto Eliot’s. It takes Eliot another minute or so, but then he’s spilling inside of Quinn, who looks up at Eliot with wide eyes and flushed cheeks, his mouth open on a small, revelatory gasp. 

Eliot kisses Quinn for a while, then lets go of him and straightens up. Pulls out of Quinn to watch the pearly drops of come start to leak out of him, and fuck, Eliot’s dick twitches at the sight. Quinn, who must’ve regained his shamelessness, spreads his legs wider to give Eliot a better view. “Like what you see, darlin’?”

“Yeah, I do.” Eliot slides two fingers into Quinn, into the slick mess of come and lube, and enjoys the way Quinn’s breath hitches. “You look good like this, sweetheart.”

He fingers Quinn slow and lazy, fingers squelching in and out of him until Quinn’s hard again. Then he jerks Quinn off with his other hand, both hands still moving while Quinn shivers through another orgasm. While Quinn’s still getting his breath back, Eliot meets Quinn’s eyes and licks Quinn’s come off his own fingers.

“Jesus fuck,” Quinn swears at the sight. 

Smirking, Eliot bends Quinn’s legs back, then slides his hard cock right back into Quinn, where he’s wet and full. Quinn curses at him as Eliot fucks him slow and steady, marveling at the way come oozes from Quinn’s hole every time Eliot thrusts inside. Oversensitive and trembling, Quinn pulls Eliot in for a filthy kiss, raking blunt nails down Eliot’s back as they groan into each other’s mouths. 

By the time Eliot comes again, Quinn’s hard and two strokes of his cock away from coming again, too.

When Eliot pulls out, he feels a warm kind of satisfaction roll through him at the sight Quinn makes, wrecked and leaking Eliot’s come between his legs. 

“I should plug you up, make you stay full like that,” Eliot murmurs. He’s just running his mouth without thinking, because he’s never been huge on toys anyway, but then Quinn’s dick twitches at his words and Quinn flushes darker, and Eliot thinks, _huh_. 

He files that one away to think about some other time, and then he helps Quinn to the bathroom so that they can get washed up.

They dress in loose-fitting yukatas and order a full kaiseki dinner into their suite, where they eat on the low table in the main tatami room, devouring sushi and crab meat and steamed abalone. They venture out to the public onsen not long after that, keeping their distance from the few other patrons so that the marks they’ve left on each other aren’t too easily noticed. 

Once they’ve relaxed for a good hour or so, they return to their suite, where Quinn pulls Eliot’s yukata open and strips it off of him with deft hands, then shoves him onto the bed on his hands and knees.

Having Quinn fuck him bare is just as arousing as Eliot imagined and a hundred times more intense. He barely manages to hold out until Quinn comes inside of him—which feels so satisfying that Eliot’s distantly worried he’s going to develop a kink for it—and then Quinn’s turning him over onto his back, sliding down the length of Eliot’s body to get his mouth around Eliot’s cock. Eliot doesn’t last even a minute; he comes in Quinn’s mouth with a stuttering groan, and then watches Quinn look him in the eye as he swallows.

Eliot hauls Quinn up for a kiss, tasting his own come on Quinn’s tongue, and then it takes them only fifteen minutes before Quinn’s fucking Eliot again.

The rest of the week proceeds in a similar fashion. They eat, sleep, and take long periods of time simply soaking themselves in the hot springs. They even occasionally venture out to wander through the local eateries and sights. Mostly, though, they spend their time in bed, making a mess out of each other and reveling in it.

“Is this a one-time thing?” Quinn asks, the night before they check out and go their separate ways once more. 

Eliot wants it to be more than a one-time thing. He wants it to be a whole life thing, to be honest. But he doesn’t know if Quinn is ready for it; if _he_ is ready for it. For all that Eliot can face down knives and guns and a dozen killers out for his blood, he isn’t brave enough to ask Quinn if they could be something more. Something like a home to each other. 

So he says, “One-time thing.” He pauses, and then adds, “We can try make it a two-time thing, if you want.”

Quinn smiles. Tucks a few strands of Eliot’s hair behind his ear. “Yeah, maybe…I have a couple jobs that’ll take a while, but after that—yeah.”

“Sounds good to me,” Eliot murmurs.

-

Two months later, Eliot gets a call from a man named Victor Dubenich.


	5. Chapter 5

Eliot doesn’t have anybody else to blame but himself when Quinn turns and knocks him halfway across an airport hangar in Los Angeles. It’s been eleven months since he last saw Quinn, and he’s been so caught up in the satisfaction of a job nearly completed, of finally doing something that will maybe help Nate, that he doesn’t recognize the dirty blonde curls until he’s been punched down.

Even as Eliot’s instinctively scrambling for his earbud, trying to alert the team that the con’s been blown, there’s a part of him that wants to reach out to Quinn, to grab him and hold on and never let go. It’s a testament to how deeply fucked he is that when Quinn kicks him and breaks his ribs, all he can think is _fuck, I missed you_.

“This all you got?” Quinn taunts with a vicious grin, and Eliot pulls himself together and gets ready for a proper fight.

It lasts longer than he’d like; Quinn caught him entirely off-guard and the broken ribs put Eliot at a disadvantage. Still, Eliot _knows_ Quinn’s fighting style, even if it’s been nearly two whole years since they’ve fought each other, and he knows that the easiest way to beat Quinn is to give him the upper hand, then drag him down. Sure, it’s harder than it should’ve been, but he manages to grab a hold of Quinn and knee him hard enough to feel the crack of his ribs. From there, it’s easy to punch Quinn out.

He hesitates, but before he leaves, he takes Quinn’s phone and punches an address into it. He knows it’s a risk; Quinn is working for Sterling, which means that if Quinn chooses to stick to his job, he can easily give this address away. Quinn might not even _care_. It’s been eleven months. Eleven months where neither of them sought each other out. Where Eliot had been so breathlessly swept into the rush of having a team, having something worth fighting for, that he hadn’t gone looking for Quinn.

Eliot knows this goes both ways, but he feels guilty as hell anyway. Maybe that’s why he leaves the address. If Quinn decides that whatever he had going on with Eliot doesn’t mean anything anymore…well, that’ll be the end of it, then.

When Eliot walks into his safehouse on the outskirts of the city several hours later, after their headquarters are blown up and the team has scattered to who knows where, he’s so grateful to find Quinn waiting for him on the living room couch that his knees nearly give out on him. 

“I hope you’re not aiming for a fuck, because neither of us are having any sex soon with our ribs busted.” Quinn says in a dry tone, raising an eyebrow at Eliot. His expression and words are just neutral enough that Eliot can’t quite figure out if he’s going to be welcomed if he goes for a kiss. 

He instead makes his way carefully to Quinn. Then, telegraphing his movements as painstakingly as possible, he reaches out and threads his fingers through Quinn’s curls.

Quinn doesn’t smack his hand away, In fact, he tilts his head, just a little bit, into Eliot’s touch. Eliot feels a rush of relief so strong that he can’t help but lean down despite the sharp twinge in his ribs and press a kiss to the top of Quinn’s head. Then Quinn’s tipping his head back, baring his throat, twisting a little to meet Eliot halfway, and then they’re kissing. Quinn opens his mouth when Eliot licks at the seam of his lips, and then Eliot’s getting lost in the kiss, reveling in the fact that he gets to taste Quinn again. 

After a while, the pain in Eliot’s side grows insistent enough that he has to pull away, one thumb stroking Quinn’s bruised cheekbone as he says, “Fuck, you really didn’t pull any punches today.”

Quinn rolls his eyes. “As if we’ve ever pulled punches with each other.”

Eliot makes his way around the couch to sit beside Quinn, careful not to jostle him. He knows their ribs aren’t in any state to allow for Eliot collapsing his weight upon Quinn or pulling him in for a hug. He simply slides close enough that their thighs are pressed against each other, a warm line of contact that soothes the desire coiling in Eliot’s gut. 

Now that he’s not riding high on adrenaline or blinded by his sheer joy at having Quinn within touching distance again, questions are starting to pop up in Eliot’s mind. The first one out of his mouth is, “Did you take this job because you knew I’d be here?”

Quinn gives Eliot an unimpressed look and doesn’t say anything, which is a yes.

_Did you miss me?_ Eliot nearly asks next, but he doesn’t dare. “What’ve you been up to?”

“Oh, this and that.” Quinn’s smile is sly but tired. “Punching people. Breaking people’s ribs. Getting paid.” He sighs. “Probably won’t get the second half of my payment for kicking your ass, though.”

“It’s your fault for not knocking me out faster.” The memory of that afternoon comes back to him. He remembers the conflicting emotions in his chest, the desire to stay with Quinn clashing with the need to go get the team out of trouble. He still feels the hurt of walking away from the team like a bullet wound not stitched up quite right. Bleeding out, stinging with every reminder. He can’t help but feel a sort of resentment for having been forced into this position. “Quinn, did you know about my team when you came here?”

Quinn meets his eye steadily. “I knew you were working with a crew for the long term. Which, you know, was surprising. But yes, I knew Sterling wanted all of you arrested.”

There’s a million questions Eliot wants to ask, starting from _how much did Sterling pay you to take me down_ all the way to _did you know how much the team meant to me,_ but there’s only one that really matters to him. “Why didn’t you come see me sooner, if you knew where I was?”

“You had a crew,” Quinn says, averting his eyes. 

Eliot hears what Quinn isn’t saying as clear as day. _I thought you didn’t need me anymore._

His throat closes up with the implications of that answer. He barely manages to choke down the words that threaten to burst out of him, the confession of how the yearning is a bone-deep thing nowadays, that he always misses Quinn even when he’s nearly overwhelmed by the ragtag group of misfits that have become his team.

Instead, Eliot says, his voice barely steady, “You’re always welcome to come over and say hi, you know. You don’t have to get a job to punch me as an excuse.”

“It’s not like you’d be the one to come over and say hi, I guess,” Quinn drawls, and there’s that familiar sting of guilt in Eliot’s chest. He doesn’t know how to say that he’d desperately wanted to find Quinn, but that a part of him had been terrified. That he’d known that if he met Quinn again, he’d want more than what they already had. That he’d wanted this thing that he had with the team, too. And fuck, he hadn’t been sure if he could come back to the team if he went to find Quinn, or if Quinn would come with him to LA. He hadn’t known, and in the end he hadn’t done anything at all.

It doesn’t matter. They’re all excuses. Eliot knows better than to offer meaningless words to Quinn. 

“I’ll come find you next time,” Eliot says, because he thinks that’s a promise he could keep. The team is scattering for six months anyway. He has time. “And I promise it won’t be to punch you.”

Quinn huffs, but some of the tension in his shoulders melts away. “I have to leave tomorrow morning. Before Sterling tries to ask questions.”

“Can you stay for the night?” Eliot asks, because he wants Quinn to stay, even if just for a little longer. “Not for sex,” he adds at Quinn’s suspicious look. “You gave me a concussion. Keep an eye on me.”

“Just for the night,” Quinn concedes, something softening in his eyes. 

They spend the rest of the night catching up, dozing for short intervals and trading lazy kisses in the quiet lulls of their conversations. Eventually, Eliot falls asleep around dawn, only to wake when dry lips press against his forehead in a silent farewell. 

“Come find me,” a quiet voice murmurs, and then all Eliot hears is the sound of the front door clicking shut.

-

It takes Eliot a couple months, after they successfully complete the con against Blackpoole and the team scatters once more in an airport hangar, but he eventually tracks Quinn down to a charming colonial-era hotel in Salvador. Eliot’s traversed through half of Brazil in the sweltering heat to find him, so he’s a little miffed when he turns up and Quinn’s initial reaction is to sigh and check his watch. “Damn, you have terrible timing.”

“Seriously?” Eliot’s almost offended, but he catches the slightest twitch of the corner of Quinn’s mouth, and that’s enough to tell him that Quinn’s happy about this abrupt visit. 

“I have to go get a job done.” Quinn steps aside to let Eliot into the room. “I won’t be back for at least three hours.”

Eliot waves him off. “Go get it done. I’ll still be here.”

“Alright,” Quinn says, turning away. 

Eliot’s on the verge of being affronted by the fact that he didn’t even get a hello kiss when Quinn pauses, then shoves Eliot up against the wall and kisses him, hard and hungry in a way that makes Eliot unwittingly moan into Quinn’s mouth. Quinn keeps him pinned like that for a good minute, kissing him until they’re both breathless, and then Quinn’s pulling away with a grin and a lick to his lips. 

“Almost forgot to do that.” Quinn winks. “See you later, darlin’.”

Then Quinn’s gone, the door clicking shut behind him, and Eliot has to take a moment to get his breathing and dick under control.

It’s the late afternoon and sunlight is streaming through the quaint windows. Eliot decides he might as well make himself comfortable and takes a long, thorough shower, pulling on a pair of fresh underwear and nothing else as he pads around the room, inspecting it and admiring the four poster bed and its hanging curtains. He spends a good five minutes looking outside the windows down at the plaza and churches, watching the people walking by and absentmindedly checking for any suspicious figures. Once he’s looked his fill, he climbs onto the bed and settles down for a nap.

Eliot wakes up when he hears the door click, his body instantly going on alert as his eyes snap open, but then he sees Quinn coming through the doorway, one hand holding two paper bags that smell heavenly, closing the door shut behind him with an apologetic smile as he makes his way to the bed. 

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Quinn murmurs, setting the paper bags on the bedside table. The mattress dips under his weight when he sits on the edge of the bed to run his fingers through Eliot’s hair, following the line of his nape down his spine, trailing his fingertips lightly across bare skin. Faint pleasure flickers through Eliot at the touch, and he feels a frisson of disappointment when Quinn pulls his hand away, grabbing the paper bags once more. “Dinner first. I’m starving.”

With a grumble, Eliot gets up and follows Quinn to the corner where there’s a table and two chairs. Quinn’s brought shrimp vatapá and chicken empadãos, which they devour over Eliot’s reenactment of what happened with Blackpoole and Quinn’s vague explanation of the job he just completed today. Once they’re done eating, they spend a moment eyeing each other.

“How long are you staying?” Quinn asks.

“However long you’ll have me,” Eliot answers.

Quinn goes quiet, a contemplative gleam entering his eyes, and Eliot waits him out. 

“I was supposed to stay here for only three more days,” Quinn says slowly. “But I guess I wouldn’t mind extending that for another week.”

Ten days. It’s the most time they’ve ever spent continuously in each other’s company. Eliot wonders if they’ll finally grow tired of each other after this. Or if he’ll end up simply wanting more. Either way, this is what Quinn is willing to give him, and he’ll gratefully take it. 

“Sounds good to me,” Eliot says, and finally drags Quinn to bed.

They spend hours relearning each other’s bodies, rediscovering familiar territory as they slide their hands over bare skin, pressing their mouths to every inch that they can reach. At some point, Quinn wrestles Eliot onto his hands and knees, spreading his ass open with both thumbs to eat him out until Eliot’s shaking and hissing swear words through his gritted teeth. Then Quinn flips Eliot over onto his back, rolling a condom on in a heartbeat, then pushes his cock inside without warning. 

Eliot manages to last two more minutes before he comes all over his stomach.

Then he’s all pliant and loose-limbed, shuddering through the aftershocks as Quinn keeps fucking him, every slick slide of his cock sending a fresh riot of goosebumps across Eliot’s skin. When Quinn’s hips finally stutter to a stop, Eliot grabs Quinn by his hair and hauls him in for a kiss to stop himself from saying anything irrevocably stupid or reckless, swallowing Quinn’s groan instead. 

“Do you think this counts as a honeymoon?” Quinn asks when they break apart, and there’s a silent question there. Something perilously close to asking if this still means something. 

Eliot swallows his heart down from where it’s climbed up to his throat. “Sure.” Keeps his voice casual. “I expect better than takeout for tomorrow, though.”

Quinn laughs, a genuine smile blooming on his face. Eliot is helpless but to kiss it. 

The rest of their stay in Salvador is a mix of venturing outside to walk through the colorfully painted buildings and gorging themselves on local foods, having countless rounds of sex in the four-poster bed, and talking about the things they’ve been up to in the past year that they weren’t able to say back in LA. They fall back into a well-worn rhythm with each other, like they haven’t spent a year apart, still remembering each other’s bodies and habits inside-out. 

By the time the ten days are up, Eliot knows that this isn’t enough. It never will be. He wants more. So much more than the ten days Quinn is willing to give him, and something deep in his chest aches fiercely as he bids Quinn goodbye in the hotel room. He kisses Quinn for ages, pressing Quinn up against the door and pouring his entire goddamn heart into the kiss, trying to convey everything he can’t say aloud in the way he licks into Quinn’s mouth. 

When they separate, Eliot presses his forehead against Quinn’s and says, “Next honeymoon is on me.”

It’s the closest he can come to a promise, to a confession.

“I’ll look forward to it,” Quinn whispers.

Eliot leaves first, taking his go bag and feeling like he’s leaving a piece of himself behind, wondering where to go now that every person who he gives a damn about is in the wind. In the end, he decides he might as well go back to what he does best: work his way forward. 

He’s heard that Pakistan is interesting this time of the year.

-

It takes three years for Eliot to see Quinn again. Three whole fucking years.

Part of it is his own fault; there just wasn’t any time to go hunt Quinn down when the team was working at full throttle; he was so busy trying to keep the team from falling apart while Sophie was gone, and then while Nate was arrested he hadn’t had the headspace to even think about straying from Boston. Then the whole deal with Moreau came along, and well, he wasn’t going to drag Quinn into that. Moreau was from a time before Quinn, and he would never let the worst times of his life taint the best ones. 

He’d gone looking for Quinn after San Lorenzo, though. Had tried to track Quinn down, but he’d ran out of time when Nate called him in to Alaska, and then they’d all got sidetracked by Latimer, and now—

Now, Latimer and Dubenich need to be taught a lesson, and Eliot finally has the time and reason to go hunt Quinn down. 

It isn’t easy, but when he finally finds Quinn in Kiev and meets his eyes across in that warehouse, all he wants to do is go kiss him, Ukrainian gangsters be damned. The way Quinn smiles at him, fond and a little exasperated, gives him hope that he’s not the only one who feels like this, like a part of him that was missing is slotting in. Like finally coming home. 

Three years apart, and that’s what clinches it. 

There isn’t time to be sharing revelations or declarations of undying devotion right now, though, so Eliot decides to save it for afterwards, when he’s not worrying about Nate’s bloodlust and in the middle of what might be the most complicated job they’ve ever had to pull off. So he focuses on getting the both of them back to Boston under Dubenich’s radar, stealing one kiss in the privacy of the silent warehouse before they leave, overcome with the emotion of _you, it’s always been you, I’ve been waiting to come home to you for my entire life_.

On their flight, in the privacy of the two of them squeezed together in economy seats on a red-eye flight, Quinn whispers, “Would you have come looking for me without this job?”

“Yes,” Eliot says, because he would have. He might have taken a while, and he might’ve needed a push, but he would’ve gone looking for Quinn. It was only a matter of time. He wonders if that holds true for Quinn, too. “What about you? Were you gonna come find me at some point?”

Quinn’s gaze drops to his lap. It’s a thing he sometimes does, when he’s trying to tell the truth but needs a moment to remember how to do that. “I…maybe.” He swallows. “I thought about it.”

Eliot doesn’t ask why he didn’t. It’s not like he did any better than Quinn. But he wonders if Quinn had missed him as much as Eliot did. If Quinn had been as terrified as him, not quite sure he was ready to admit just what exactly they meant to each other. He wonders if he matters as much to Quinn as Quinn matters to him. 

He places his hand over Quinn’s on the armrest, and Quinn twitches, tensing under Eliot’s touch. For a moment, Eliot wonders if he made the wrong move, but then Quinn relaxes, just a notch. 

Quinn turns his head away, intent on looking out the window, and he doesn’t turn his hand over to hold Eliot’s.

But he doesn’t pull away, either.

It’s enough for Eliot to smile to himself for the whole flight.

-

The job is going as smoothly as a con with a coldly determined Nate can go. Quinn easily catches onto Eliot’s worries and distracts him with friendly barbs and jokes, which Eliot can’t help but respond to. It’s hard not to respond when Quinn’s saying shit like, “Honestly, Eliot, I can’t believe you picked our honeymoon to be in a _cave_.”

“This one doesn’t count!” Eliot scowls. “And shut up, the one you took me on in Norway was an _igloo_.”

“At least that one was a surprise and I didn’t owe it to you.” Quinn folds his arms. “You _owe_ me a new honeymoon.”

Eliot resists the urge to kick him. “Stop complaining! You _liked_ Japan.”

Hardison looks at them from over his laptop, horrified. “Are you…are you two married?”

“No,” Quinn and Eliot say in perfect unison.

“Oh god,” Hardison hisses, and for once Chaos looks like he’s in total agreement with him. “Husbands. They’re _work husbands_.”

Eliot nearly smacks Hardison for that comment, but he sees the way Quinn’s expression goes thoughtful, and he immediately says, “Whatever you’re about to say, don’t say it.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.” Then Quinn says it anyway: “I was just thinking about that time in Las Vegas, it would’ve been funny if—”

“Nate!” Eliot nearly yelps, cutting Quinn off. He ignores the deeply disturbed looks on the two hackers’ faces and the look of amusement on Sophie’s. “We’re ready for Phase Two!”

The rest of the con goes off without a hitch, even with Nate getting shot, because what matters is that Nate didn’t go down the same road as Eliot did. That his soul is still intact in a way Eliot’s can never be again. So Eliot relaxes, all the way down to his bones for the first time since Nate’s dad died, and goes back to his safehouse at the edge of the city. 

He finds Quinn already there, looking immaculate and enticing as ever in just his dress shirt and slacks, carefully leaning a hip against the secondhand couch in the living room. Eliot can’t help but feel warmth rush through him at the sight, a sense of rightness at coming back to where Quinn is waiting for him. 

Quinn welcomes him back with a kiss. “I take it that everything went well?”

“Yeah,” Eliot says against Quinn’s mouth, then blinks at the faint scent of soap clinging to Quinn’s skin. “Did you shower?”

“Kind of,” Quinn says with a mischievous smirk, which means that he’s angling for a good fuck. There’s no other reason for him to have pulled on smart clothes instead of something more comfortable other than to seduce Eliot. Which is redundant, given how Eliot finds Quinn attractive regardless of what he’s wearing, but he appreciates the effort. 

He shows that appreciation by tugging Quinn into the bedroom by his belt loops, stealing quick kisses as they go. They both get rid of their shirts fairly quickly, but then when Eliot goes for Quinn’s fly, Quinn shakes his head. “Yours off first.”

Eliot doesn’t have any complaints about that. But it’s a specific thing to ask for, and his mind is going through the possible reasons as he shucks his pants and socks off. He hazards a guess. “You gonna fuck me in while you’re wearing those?”

“No, I was thinking you could fuck me this time,” Quinn says easily, looking satisfied when Eliot finally pulls his underwear off. “Just wanted to make sure you were ready for a surprise.”

“What surprise?” Eliot asks, suddenly wary.

Quinn rolls his eyes and tugs Eliot’s hands towards the front of his own pants. “Check for yourself.”

Eliot carefully unbuttons the front of Quinn’s pants and unzips him, only to discover that Quinn isn’t wearing underwear. He feels heat flicker through him at the discovery as he watches the slacks drop to the floor, leaving Quinn naked. “Okay, that’s a pretty tame surprise, but I like it.”

“Oh, you haven’t seen it yet,” Quinn says, pushing Eliot towards the bed. 

There’s already a pack of condoms and a bottle of lube dumped at the head of the bed, so Eliot climbs on and settles himself against the headboard. Quinn gets on the bed as well, but there’s a slight hiss through his teeth as he does so, which makes Eliot narrow his eyes. “You didn’t get injured, did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” Quinn says with a chuckle. He crawls over to straddle Eliot’s lap with a grin that promises trouble. The kind of trouble that Eliot’s cock would be interested in. “But if you wanna fuck me til it hurts, I’m up for that.”

Eliot’s dick twitches. “That can be arranged.”

He’s reaching for the lube when Quinn says, “Condom first.”

“You gonna be ordering me around all day?” Eliot asks, grabbing a packet and ripping it open. He doesn’t have anything against Quinn bossing him around, but it seems weirdly specific and without a real purpose. Still, he rolls the condom on while Quinn takes the lube. 

“Just wanted you to be prepared,” Quinn says, pouring a generous amount on his palm. Then he reaches down to wrap that hand around Eliot’s cock, pumping it slow and easy to spread the lube on it. 

Eliot groans at the touch, then watches Quinn drop the lube somewhere to the side where Eliot can’t reach it easily. “The hell?”

“Don’t need it.” Quinn slides both hands up Eliot’s shoulders and curves them around the back of his neck, pulling him closer. “You can fuck me now.”

The implications make Eliot’s breath hitch. It makes sense, he thinks. Quinn must have prepped himself in the shower. He tests that theory by sliding a hand up the back of Quinn’s thigh, reaching the curve of his ass and dipping his fingers inwards, expecting Quinn to be wet and loose, but instead he encounters something else. Something solid.

Holy _shit_.

“Quinn.” Eliot traces the flat base of the solid object with his fingertips. “Is that—?”

“Remember that thing you said in Japan?” Quinn asks, his voice going a little breathless as Eliot presses the base inwards. “About filling me up and plugging me? We gotta get tested again to do that, but I figured we could get a head start on the second half of that.”

It’s been four years, but Eliot does remember it. That little fantasy is one of the things that he’s been revisiting a lot in the past several years. “Jesus fuck.”

“Yeah, well,” Quinn starts, but then Eliot hooks an arm around his waist and pushes Quinn backwards, flipping them so that Quinn is on his back and Eliot’s hovering over him. Quinn blinks at the sudden movement. “Fucking hell.”

Eliot leans back and grabs Quinn by both ankles, spreading his legs open and folding them back so he can get a good look, and _fuck_ , there’s the flared base of a black butt plug right there, and Eliot’s internal temperature must’ve skyrocketed from how fucking hot it is. 

He lets go of one ankle, which Quinn obediently doesn’t move, and grabs hold of the base of the plug, carefully pulling it out. Quinn’s breath catches in his chest as Eliot pulls the whole thing out and takes a moment to marvel at how big it is. It’s not as thick as Eliot’s cock, but it’s still fairly sizable. Eliot’s impressed that Quinn was able to walk around with it inside him. 

“Couldn’t wait for my cock inside you?” Eliot asks, dropping the plug on the bed and lining himself up to where Quinn is lube-slick and so fucking ready, and it takes every ounce of his self-control to not shove his cock in immediately. Instead, he teases Quinn’s rim with the head of his cock, watching the way Quinn squirms his hips with impatience. “Wanted to be filled up so badly that you fucked yourself with this and got ready for me, huh?”

“Was just thinking I’d hurry things up,” Quinn says, but his cheeks are red and he’s spreading his legs a little wider. Eliot wants to eat him alive.

“We’re getting tested tomorrow,” Eliot says decisively. “Then I’m taking you on a hell of a honeymoon. Gonna come inside you and plug you up, leave you full and wet so that I can fuck you whenever I want, make sure you’re fucking _dripping_ with it.”

A low whine erupts from Quinn’s throat. “Eliot, stop talking and just fuck me already.”

Eliot presses the head of his cock to Quinn’s entrance. “How bad do you want it, sweetheart?” 

“I spent three fucking years pretending every single person who ever touched me was you,” Quinn says, and Eliot’s whole fucking heart tumbles out of his chest right into Quinn’s hands. “How bad do you think I want it?”

“Fuck,” Eliot breathes, and then he’s sliding into Quinn in one smooth thrust, bottoming out in a blink, and he very nearly comes just from the obscene sound Quinn makes.

Once he’s inside Quinn, it’s impossible to hold back. The fact that Quinn got a sex toy based on a throwaway comment Eliot made four whole years ago, that Quinn spent all these years thinking of Eliot—how the fuck is Eliot supposed to learn that and _not_ fuck Quinn senseless?

So Eliot fucks Quinn rough and hard and fast, until Quinn’s coming with a shattered moan, clenching around Eliot’s cock. Until Eliot’s breath is shuddering out of him in a harsh exhale as he buries himself as deep as he can go inside Quinn and comes.

Eliot is still sprawled over Quinn’s chest when he feels Quinn move, one hand resting on Eliot’s back while the other runs lazily through Eliot’s hair. Eliot wants to return the favor—he’s secretly and desperately attracted to the way Quinn’s curls have grown out—but he’s too tired to reach up. 

Quinn’s chest vibrates under Eliot’s cheek when he asks, “You made honeymoon plans?”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, because he’d had enough bits of spare time throughout the past week to come up with them. “Depends on how long you want it to be, though.”

Quinn’s hand pauses for a moment, but then it resumes stroking Eliot’s hair. “Maybe three weeks?”

Three weeks. Eliot can work with that. 

He lifts his head to give Quinn a smirk. “You’re gonna need something more comfortable than a suit.”

-

They land in Auckland first.

“I’ve never been to New Zealand before,” Quinn comments, looking around the city sprawled across the blue sky. 

Eliot shrugs. “Me neither.” He takes a moment to enjoy the sight of Quinn in a linen button-up and jeans. “Figured we should try discovering new territory together for once.”

They stick their bags in a decent hotel room and spend the afternoon walking around the city, taking in the sights like they’re just another couple of ordinary tourists, feasting on crayfish for dinner and then retiring to their bedroom so that Eliot can ride Quinn. The next day, they go on a day trip to Waiheke Island, which is stunningly gorgeous. After a long hike through the walking trails, they visit a vineyard and get tipsy on wine and eat oysters. Before returning to the city, they stop by the beach to watch the sun go down. 

They spend another day in Auckland, squeezing in a visit to Piha Beach in the morning, letting the waves lap at their bare ankles as they walk along the shore. They return to the city and hunt down the best eateries, and Eliot buys trinkets that he thinks the rest of the team would like. A snow globe for Sophie. Magnets for Nate. Keychains for Hardison. Fresh New Zealand dollar bills for Parker. For Quinn, he chooses a pair of reflective sunglasses to match his own, which Quinn laughs at but still wears anyway.

The next day, they rent a car and head down to Hamilton, which is full of lush scenery and beautifully maintained gardens that they enjoy for a day. At night, Quinn tackles Eliot to the bed and sucks him off upside down, while Eliot returns the favor at the same time. 

They take a detour to Tauranga next, where the seafood is delicious and the architecture has centuries of history. It’s nice and relaxing, and at one point they take a helicopter to White Island to explore the volcano there, which Quinn apparently finds genuinely fascinating. Eliot spends more time watching Quinn’s reactions than the live volcano underneath them.

Then it’s Rotorua, where there’s a thermal reserve that reminds Eliot of the Hell Valley at Noboribetsu with its billowing steam. It’s a quick look though, and so they spend the rest of the day in bed, leaving bite marks on each other’s skin and taking it slow and easy.

They go bungee jumping in Taupo next. Quinn’s done it before, but Eliot hasn’t. It’s a little like skydiving, but much more of a freefall with only a rope that stretches and then bounces him back up over a beautiful valley with a crystal-clear blue river under him. His hair goes windswept and wild, and Quinn laughs as he combs it back with his fingers for him, pulling Eliot into a kiss when he’s sure nobody else is looking, and Eliot’s heart skips a damn beat.

Next is Napier, which includes an outing to Hastings, and then they move onto Palmerston North. There aren’t a lot of sights there, but Eliot makes it interesting by fucking Quinn hard and coming inside of him. Then he plugs Quinn up, like he’s been wanting to do for days—years, in a sense—now, and makes Quinn take a walk with him around town, until Quinn’s flushed and desperate. Then Eliot takes Quinn back to their quaint hotel and pulls the plug out, watching the pearly white drops of come leak out of Quinn with a vicious kind of satisfaction before he fucks Quinn again. Quinn’s moans and the filthy wet noises of their fucking is what tips Eliot over, and then he’s turning Quinn around to haul his ass up and eat him out, licking the come out of him while Quinn comes for the fifth time of the day. 

“You’re fucking _filthy_ ,” Quinn says, but his tone is fond, and Eliot grins when Quinn kisses him to taste Eliot’s come on his tongue.

Wellington is a fun city, full of things to look at and foods to try. Eliot falls in love with Māori hāngī and the local craft beer while Quinn eats enough pavlova to make him groan from how full he is. They walk through the city to admire the lit-up city under the night sky, and then Quinn drags Eliot to a club for dancing. Eliot doesn’t dance, but he enjoys the way Quinn moves against him, and they tumble into their hotel room and barely get their clothes off before they’re rutting against each other and coming.

From there they cross over to the South island, taking the scenic route through Marlborough before a trek through the Nelson Lakes National Park. It’s not an easy hike, but they relax after that the next day in Hamner Springs, luxuriating in a local resort and going through lazy rounds of sex. Eliot stays awake late into the night, counting the days left of this little escape from the rest of the world. 

Then they’re in the bustling streets of Christchurch, going to all the best restaurants and walking along the beaches. They take a boat ride around just for the hell of it, laughing over the memories of their last boat ride together under the moon, from Shanghai to Taipei.

It’s a short drive from there Ashburton, where they spend more time in bed than seeing the sights. Quinn spends hours fucking him until Eliot’s ass is sore, which is horrible because they go to the Aoraki Mount Cook Park the next day, and limping up a mountain is torturous. Quinn laughs at him the whole time, until they reach the summit and quietly enjoy the beauty of the scenery ahead of them. Eliot takes pictures and sends them to the team when he has reception again, getting awed and delighted reactions from them back. Except for Nate, who simply says that he’s glad Eliot is having a good time.

From there it’s another day of adventuring through nature as they drop their things in a rickety B&B in a tiny town at the edge of Lake Tekapo, after which they fall into bed, too exhausted to have sex. Then it’s Wanaka, which has breathtaking scenery. A sprawling, shimmering lake surrounded by massive mountains that lend a sort of grandiosity to the landscape. It’s so quiet and gorgeous that Eliot can’t help but take Quinn’s hand for a moment and squeeze it. 

When Quinn squeezes back, Eliot knows that this will be one of the places he’ll remember forever. 

They take a last detour to Milford Sound, because it’s the place they’ve been recommended the most by the locals, and it’s worth the trip. Eliot is reminded of the wide open view and serene calm of the fjord back in Tromsø, captivating in a way that makes his chest feel too tight, and when he sees the joy on Quinn’s face at the sight, he thinks, _I’d go to the end of the world with you_.

Then it’s their last destination, Queenstown. It feels like they’ve been together for ages or a heartbeat, and Eliot wishes this goddamn country were bigger, or that Quinn could spare longer than three weeks. He wishes that they could have more than this cat and mouse game they have going on. That this thing between them meant something. Everything.

“Come back with me,” Eliot says on their last night, when their skin has cooled from the heat of moving against each other, when they lay in the dark, his back against Quinn’s chest and Quinn’s arms around him, one hand over Eliot’s heart. “I wanna come home.”

Quinn arms tighten around him. “You already have a home. With them.”

Eliot thinks about their first meeting in Buenos Aires. About Prague, where the honeymoon jokes started. Marseille, when they first had sex, and Venice, when the sex had been more than just revenge and teasing. Seychelles and Singapore, two of the best trips he ever went on. He thinks of his heart squeezing tight in his chest as Quinn laughed against his mouth, the Northern Lights dancing above them. He thinks about fucking up in Shanghai and apologizing in Taipei. The lazy, domestic days spent together in his safehouse in Seoul. A conversation they had in the dark in Las Vegas. Quinn coming to save his life in Monaco. An indulgent week in Noboribetsu where there was nothing between them except the words they never spoke aloud. He thinks about the relief he felt in seeing Quinn again in Los Angeles. Kiev, where everything became clear. He thinks of the past three weeks.

He thinks it’s time to finally say what he really wants.

He turns around to face Quinn, and the dim moonlight filtering through the windows is enough for him to see the wide-eyed look on Quinn’s face when Eliot says, “I have a family. But you’re the only real home to me.”

“I,” Quinn begins in a cracked voice, and he swallows, pressing his forehead against Eliot’s. “I don’t know if I’m ready. To come home.”

Eliot understands. It isn’t easy to settle down and make a home out of somebody. It isn’t easy to be the one that somebody comes home to. Eliot’s fucking terrified of it. 

But he still wants it, more than anything in the world. 

“I can wait,” Eliot says, quiet and honest and his heart already in Quinn’s hands. In Quinn’s chest. “Come find me when you’re ready.”

Quinn exhales shakily, his arms tight around Eliot like he doesn’t want to let go. “Okay.” His voice is quiet, but it feels like a promise. Like something Eliot can hang his hopes on. “Okay.”

-

Ten months pass, and Eliot waits through them all. He exchanges text messages with Quinn. Sometimes they even call each other, sharing mundane things. Jobs they’ve done, where they’ve been. They don’t talk about when Quinn is coming back. Whether he’s coming back at all. But Eliot waits anyway, because there’s only one home for him, even if it’s not with him in Portland just yet. 

Then one day, he comes back to his apartment to find that it’s been broken into. 

He tenses, ready for a fight, but when he enters the living room with a knife at the ready, he finds Quinn sitting in the armchair, a bouquet of flowers on his lap.

“Quinn?” Eliot asks, disbelieving even as he ventures closer.

Just as Eliot’s about to reach him, Quinn stands up, bouquet in hand, and offers it to Eliot. “Happy anniversary.”

Eliot takes it, perplexed. “What anniversary?” He mentally goes through every city they’ve been to, and then it dawns on him. “Buenos Aires.”

“It’s been ten years,” Quinn says quietly with a smile, and Eliot thinks that if Quinn walks out on him again, he wouldn’t survive it. That he can’t let Quinn leave, because this is where they belong. With each other. “Guess that means the honeymoon period is over.”

“Doesn’t have to mean I can’t take you wherever you want,” Eliot says. “Canada, Egypt, Vietnam—I don’t care. We can go whenever you like. Doesn’t have to be a honeymoon as long as it’s the two of us.”

Quinn brushes a thumb against Eliot’s cheekbone. Cups his cheek. “I hate Portland.”

“Join the fucking club,” Eliot says.

“But it won’t be too bad if I’m with you,” Quinn says. “If you’re the one I come back to at the end of the day.”

And how is Eliot supposed to respond to that but kiss him? He drops the bouquet gently on the coffee table and hauls Quinn in by the lapels for a hungry, aching kiss, and Quinn kisses back, like he’s missed Eliot for so long. Like he’s finally ready to _keep_ Eliot.

“Darlin’,” Quinn says in a trembling exhale and a brave smile, “I’m home.”

Eliot laughs, his whole body warming as if it’s found the hearth to rest by. Finally at home after all these years. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be taking a two-week break from my usual posting schedule, because the next fic is going to be pretty long and I need time to write most of it up before I start posting chapters! Look out for a new fic in a couple weeks (you can get prompt updates if you subscribe to me or if you follow either of my tumblr accounts, btw)! 
> 
> In the meantime, you could encourage your local writer to write faster by feeding her with comments :)
> 
> Thanks for reading to the very end!!

**Author's Note:**

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